SAP User Experience
Not ready to upgrade or move to S/4HANA but you need to continue to optimise your SAP based processes?
Many SAP customers want to sweat their existing ECC asset for a few more years yet – especially since SAP announced the extension of the support for ECC until 2027. We have analysed the “white space” in SAP’s Fiori portfolio available to ECC customers and have identified 8 key areas within which to develop accelerator apps to make a tangible difference to efficient operations.
Available on desktop, tablet or mobile, and proven to run on ECC and the latest S/4HANA platforms Absoft’s apps can help your organisation make step changes to your core business processes now and for the future.
Shop Floor App
Vendor Invoice Portal App
Logistics Workbench App
Stores Apps
Shopping Apps
Approvals App
Payroll Monitoring & Processing App
Analytics
Learn more about our apps
Absoft’s eponymous shop floor app is aimed at production supervisors and shop floor operators. The app is proven to maximise work centre usage, provide easy-to-understand and timely instructions to operators and technicians and stops the wasteful mass printing of production orders. It also automates material consumption and the flow of goods and materials around the plant as well as dynamically creating deliveries as soon as goods come available from production.
“The work release process to the factory is taking considerably less time and has been handled digitally. Prior to SAP there were eight paper documents produced per machine and roughly 20 pieces of paper produced per batch. This was time consuming to produce and took a lot of time to manage if there were changes or errors. SAP has reduced this process to about an hour and a half a week and changes are automatically distributed to the factory.”
The Absoft Vendor Invoice Portal facilitates suppliers in registering their invoices in our customers SAP systems alleviating double entry of time and resource data and leveraging contractual rates held in the SAP, fostering compliance and managing controllable spend.
Vendors can also check the status of their invoices in the system – from registered, through approval to actual payment giving the vendor piece of mind and saving our customers payables departments having to deal with invoice queries and vendor expediting.
Our Logistics Workbench automates the pick, pack, ship and receive process, supporting users in packing items onto pallets into containers onto shipments, automating the production of customs documentation, manifests and consignment notes. The workbench also supports ad-hoc delivery and shipment creation.
Replacing tens of individual SAP transactions and screens, the Logistics Workbench is a one-stop shop and an intuitive, powerful processing engine for logistics clerks, supervisors and stores.
The screens are specifically designed to minimise the number of screens and clicks required of the user and presents processes in the form of easy to understand icons making it a great tool for remote sites or sites with high staff turnover.
Absoft’s family of stores apps bring the transactions typically performed by Stores into a unified set of intuitive, desktop, tablet or mobile based workbenches.
The Goods Receiving app provides Goods Inwards with lists of delivery due and helps them to easily process receipts and identify any compliance issues.
Our Picking app drives the picking schedule in stores and dynamically posts picking and goods issue events.
Our Stock Card app is the midfield utility player of our app suite covering counting, moving, and stock level monitoring processes with all these activities being represented in easy to use, intuitive workbench form.
Proposing tailored worklists to the user including delivery due lists, pick lists, physical count lists using straight forward, easy-to understand screens helps your organisation to drive and optimise stores processes.
Working in tandem with our analytics app, your store supervisors will be provided with easy to consume, live analytics including stock value, stock turn, dead stock, ABCS stock analysis and more with facilities to tailor dimensions, key figures and presentation methods to suit your needs.
Our shopping app offers decentralised controlled shopping to users throughout your organisation. Dynamically proposing external or internal catalogue sources and approved vendors to the shopper the Absoft shopping app offers the end-user simple to navigate, jargon free shopping experience whilst maximising the benefit from the work your contracts and procurement departments have put into strategic sourcing.
The app is available in two versions. The Lite version supports indirect procurement including “shop with limits” options, whilst the Pro version supports direct materials shopping. The Pro version automatically recognises stock versus externally purchased items and will generate stock reservations or shopping carts as appropriate.
Absoft’s approval app supports the review and approval (or rejection) of shopping carts, purchase orders, and vendor invoices. The app provides your managers with a one-stop shop for all approvals with a common look and feel to the review and approve process.
The managers are also offered live views of the budget position of the cost centres involved in the approval to help them to make informed decisions.
Our approvals app is delivered with a model delegation of authority set-up but has also utilises SAP standard integration to allow us to tap into your organisational specific set up of approval frameworks.
The approvals app has been specifically tailored to be mobile device friendly, to make sure that your travelling management team have the facility to review and approve on the move.
Absoft’s payroll monitoring app supports your organisation in the management, administration and visibility of your payrolls.
The Payroll Manager uses the app to monitor at a glance the status of the multiple payrolls in operation in the organisation. The stage of the payroll, the number of errors/warnings messages outstanding for the payroll are available in a monitor window with the ability for the manager to drill down into any of the payrolls to get further detail on the types of errors/warning messages outstanding.
The app supports the payroll administrator in the resolution of the payroll issues. Using a proprietary Absoft data engine to simulate payroll results, the payroll administrator has early visibility of issues well in advance of running payroll itself. The app not only highlights issues but also offers context sensitive solution options to help the administrator to resolve issues found there and then.
The apps ability to provide this payroll results preview function means that when you come to actual payroll day you will be confidant that it will run smoothly, resulting in a stress-free payroll period-end for payroll managers and administrators alike.
The app also provides tailored visibility of payroll status and reporting to finance managers and to external 3rd parties if required, offering further time savings for your payroll department by removing the burden of dealing with requests for status/data from internal departments and external customers.
Absoft’s analytics app, offers the ability to an organisation to create its own analytics suite. Often deployed in conjunction with one of more of the apps above, the analytics app allows the user to select their own preferred output layout (pie, bar, hat map etc.) and to select the key dimensions and metrics that they want to interrogate.
The resulting analytics can be drilled down into with options to get right down to the SAP detail comprising the analytical data. Options to export data to excel for further processing also exist.
The analytics app user can also personalise their own dashboard to ensure that they data they need is at their fingertips whenever they need it.
Frequently Asked Questions
SAP Fiori is a new user experience (UX) for SAP software and applications. It provides a set of applications that are used in regular business functions like work approvals, financial apps, calculation apps and various self-service apps. SAP Fiori provides all business roles in real time on compatible hand devices. It offers business roles on easy to use functions, simple with unmatched responsiveness on desktop, smartphones and Tablets. Apps based on Fiori are available for SAP customers running ECC systems and they have increasingly become the standard interface in SAP’s new flagship ERP product S/4HANA. Fiori apps replace the primary user interface method SAP GUI.
SAPUI5 is the technology that underpins Fiori web applications and allows them to act as the front end to SAP. They use simple language, collect more accurate data, can be made available offline, and allow the end user to transact in a simpler fashion, enabling the users to become more efficient in their day to day duties.
SAP GUI is an acronym for the term SAP Graphical User Interface which is part and parcel of the presentation layer of most SAP systems in productive use today. SAP GUI has become synonymous with the rather unattractive screens associated with older versions of SAP ERP solutions. The SAP GUI interface is being replaced in the latest versions of the SAP ERP by Fiori apps which are user friendly and certainly more attuned to prevailing mobile phone and tablet-based user experiences.
Mobility refers to the ability to deploy apps on desktop, mobile and tablet devices. Offline allows these apps to function without internet access. In the mobile scenario the intelligence underpinning the app is primarily based in the back-end ERP SAP system relying on web connectivity to drive the app behaviours and navigation. For offline apps a sub-set of the intelligence is built into the device itself such that it can capture data even when offline and will sync data to the back-end when you get back in internet range.
Improving UX is not just about making the user interface look better. It is also about reducing the operational costs and enabling users to work more efficiently. Making the complicated simple is the mantra for a good UX app – it’s not just millennials who don’t want to work with clunky systems and UI’s that breed inefficiency and poor data quality.
An app/product is deployable immediately, but generic and not customized to suit your individual business needs. An app accelerator is a framework design where 80% of the app has been pre-designed and built. Absoft have numerous App Accelerators available, and work with you to design and tailor the final 20% to reflect your processes. This enables an accelerated delivery timeframe, without compromising on quality or compatibility of the app with your business.
SAP Fiori Apps significantly enhance User Experience across a multitude of industry sectors. However, there remain “White Space” areas which are industry and process specific, where a customised solution is required, but not resellable at a suitable scale for SAP development and investment. This is where Absoft’s Bespoke Apps come in.
Resources
ABAP CDS views – All you need to know
Effortless procurement in SAP
Choose and deploy a Fiori App in 5 steps