SAP Fiori gets its name from the Ital­ian word for flower. We know that flow­ers are nice to look at, are shaped with nature’s intel­li­gent design, and are delight­ful to behold. That’s some­where close to why SAP called its user expe­ri­ence (UX) lay­er SAP Fiori, and that’s also why users see a flower when they fire up this soft­ware-based lay­er for applications.

Always described as a UX inno­va­tion, SAP Fiori pro­vides a way to cre­ate a set of appli­ca­tions devot­ed to serv­ing com­mon busi­ness func­tions includ­ing work approvals, finan­cials, more com­plex cal­cu­la­tion apps, and a vari­ety of self-ser­vice tools.

But it’s not real­ly a ​“set of appli­ca­tions” in and of itself. SAP Fiori is actu­al­ly a design lan­guage that allows us to cre­ate appli­ca­tions based on exact (or close to exact) user roles, user pref­er­ences, and busi­ness process­es. It is meant to be a light­weight and speedy way to build trans­ac­tion­al apps, fact sheets, and ana­lyt­i­cal apps with­in the realms of a mod­ern (i.e., not clunky or mono­lith­ic) ERP sys­tem. The com­pa­ny describes SAP Fiori as a ​“set of com­po­nents and pat­terns” that can be reused in dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tions and that include descrip­tions and guid­ance regard­ing usage, visu­al design, copy, tone of voice, and integration.

Plant­i­ng SAP Fiori’s Seeds