David Harrison, Rizing’s Director of Business Development in Asia, recently attended the Mastering SAP® EAM conference, a hybrid-format conference that had small local meetups in Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra, Adelaide, and Perth in addition to an online component.

He came away with a renewed focus on mobility, dashboards, and KPIs within SAP EAM practices.

SAP User Interfaces

More mature and more mobile user interfaces (UI) in the SAP ecosystem caught Harrison’s interest.

“Whether you are already on S/4HANA, in the throes of a migration or sweating value from your ECC system,” Harrison says, “There are significant opportunities to be gained by any business in the human interfaces.”

Mobile SAP Solutions

A post-conference research report published by the Eventful Group, who coordinated the conference, pointed out that getting mobile interfaces to the point where they are reliable and usable hasn’t been easy.

“Selling mobility up the line is hard as there have been some first generation fails, with the technology, change management, and business readiness being common reasons why.”

However, David Harrison saw progress.

“Many of the solutions we see now have both offline and on-line functionality,” he says. “That’s been an issue in our more complex plants with lots of wi-fi blind spots.”

Fiori/UI5 User Interfaces

According to SAP.com, Fiori is “a set of design principles (or design language) from SAP that is there to help developers plan and build UI5 applications in line with SAP’s UX strategy” while UI5 is “a development framework that a developer would use to actually build a front-end application that follows the Fiori design guidelines.

“This new, intuitive, interface helps substantially with user acceptance and consequently acceptance of the SAP EAM environment,” says Harrison, “It’s also pleasing that some of the newer mobility solutions are compatible with office desktops, unifying the user experience in the office and in the field. This is a huge leap forward in user acceptance and utilisation.”

SAP Dashboards and KPI’s

Mentioning the topic as his “personal favourite,” the usefulness of dashboards and KPIs within SAP EAM practices impressed Harrison.

“Dashboards and KPI’s are used to drive business process and performance visibility,” he says. “They are being used to great effect to track business performance. They are also being used as a key organisational change management tool during both ECC re-engineering programs and S/4 migrations. They are able to demonstrate and add value to master data and asset management inspired data mining activities.”

Elsewhere on Rizing.com

Read Rizing Bid Coordinator Alex Serbin’s field report from the same conference.