SAP Personas delivers a fast and easy way to personalise screens, boost user productivity, and increase the usability of your ERP software. With SAP Personas, you can consolidate business processes into fewer screens, standardise one consistent user experience (UX), reduce training time with intuitive UIs and navigation and provide employees the Fiori user experience in areas where Fiori coverage does not yet exist. In this blog we answer some of the FAQ’s on the solution.
What are the advantages of using SAP Personas?
SAP Personas enables a skin to be added on to standard transactions to easily create simplified user interface screens. This makes the appearance simpler, it can be of a standard corporate design, and reduces the number of steps a user will take, simplifying processes, reducing user error and minimising training required.
How does it work ?
A Persona “flavour” is designed in a similar way to designing a powerpoint slide, for example:
– Buttons can be created for process steps;
– Automation can be completed using scripting;
– Field information and tabs from different transactions can be merged on to a single screen so that only the required information is shown.
The Persona flavour will be assigned to a user or role and can be set as a default so that when users sign in they will see the custom Persona screen rather than the SAP standard one.
What is the scripting?
The scripting is completed in javascript and can be used to retrieve data, automate steps or format screen elements. All the steps carried out by the script is invisible to the user.
What are the advantages of scripting?
It is possible to automate steps within a script. This enables data to be retrieved from multiple screens or update transactions posted as a background process (hidden from the user) that would otherwise be a number of repetitive clicks and transactions. You can also include data validation and error handling within the script and present to the user custom messages if required.
However, the real advantage of scripting is that conditional logic can be included in the scripts so that the automation can be based on field values and process variations can be accommodated.
Can the developer debug scripts?
Within a browser standard, debugging tools can be used when building and testing scripts. It is necessary to test the created scripts within the intended browser(s) as there are slight variations between them, such as between Internet Explorer and Google Chrome.
What are the disadvantages of scripting?
If written with many background transaction processing and data reads, the performance can be quite slow. It is necessary to optimise the javacript code to minimise the number of data reads, this will then speed up processing time. A good way of doing this is to use session variables to store values and recall rather than re-executing a read transaction.
How are scripts executed?
These can be assigned to a script button and designed within a flavour to be executed by the user, or added to screen events such as load, refresh and resize.
Is it possible to incorporate a remote function call (RFC) into a script?
Yes, this enables detailed information to be quickly retrieved. It is necessary to “whitelist” the RFC for execution by a persona script – custom RFCs can be used.
Is it possible to create a Persona flavour for a bespoke transaction?
Yes, Persona flavours can be created for standard and bespoke transactions.
Is it possible for a user to be assigned more than one transaction flavour?
Yes, this is possible although only one flavour can be assigned as the users default. It is possible for a script to change a flavour based on a condition within the script.
Can SAP Personas be run on a mobile device?
Yes, custom simple screens can be designed and deployed to users who have browser based access on a mobile windows device although an active connection is required as there is no offline capability. As of SAP Personas version 3.0 SP6, a slipstream engine specifically for the running of flavours on iPad, Android tablets and other mobile devices is included.
Can the designed Persona work with different screen sizes?
There is the option of having adaptive flavour design that will change the Persona contents and layout based on screen size. This needs to be built into the flavour; testing on different devices will determine if this is required.
How does SAP Personas fit alongside Fiori?
SAP Fiori is becoming SAP’s recommended user interface but SAP Personas can be used along side this to enhance specific requirements where a Fiori app is not available, or where a script to automate the execution of many steps is required.
How do you get started?
SAP Personas needs to be installed and there is a minimum system and version requirement. Once installed and initial system configuration is complete, a user with SAP Personas admin access can start designing and testing. Persona flavours are able to be transported between environments in the same way as any other standard configuration.
If you’d like to discuss your companies successful upgrade to the latest release of SAP Personas, please get in touch, we’d be happy to help you.
Alternatively, if you’re already running SAP Personas but require better support to keep it running at peak performance, please contact us here. Our experts can help you maximise the value of your software, take advantage of new business models and capabilities, and more.
