We’ve heard our customers loud and clear! More use OutSystems to connect and integrate with SAP than any other systems of record and are using low code to make the most out of their SAP technology investment.

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Here’s what we know: your enterprise teams face significant pressure to deliver sustainable business results — which means more applications, at faster speed and at peak performance. This includes the need to customize and modernize your existing SAP system to stay competitive and respond to requests from the business.

SAP offers ways to configure and customize your system, but — when building out modern web and mobile user experiences — that step comes with added complexity and speed concerns. Plus your SAP resources are already maxed out and don’t have the cycles for any new projects.

What if you could deliver new innovation from your existing SAP investment AND help your SAP team as they prepare for your company’s migration to S4/HANA? By using high-performance low-code, you can do both: extend SAP and rebuild SAP customizations using an AI-driven visual development environment that can turbocharge your developers productivity.

Extending SAP with OutSystems

Extending SAP with the OutSystems low-code development platform enables you to build modern capabilities on top of your SAP applications at speed and with reduced risk and disruption. In essence, it allows you to do more with what you already have.

From sales and marketing to ERP, finance, and supply chain, extending SAP gives developers the power to quickly build intuitive apps on top of SAP LoB applications and to make them available anywhere they are needed. Your developers can easily integrate SAP together with other systems of record like Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics with pre-built connectors and templates to create intuitive experiences for customers, partners, and employees — all at tremendous speed.

Your lines of business running mature processes in an SAP system benefit greatly from adding new capabilities that don’t require any changes to the underlying SAP applications.

Extending SAP is particularly useful when you need:

  • a way to easily access and consolidate information spread between SAP and other systems.
  • modern app capabilities and user experiences that SAP does not easily provide.
  • new functionality and user touchpoints without disruption to your existing SAP system or adding to your SAP developers workload.

SAP Fiori and OutSystems

SAP Fiori is a user interface (UI) design framework for SAP applications to mirror consumer-grade applications. It’s a system of guidelines, colors, fonts, and tools that ensure UI elements are visually consistent across the platform.

While OutSystems connectors and integrations have been available for SAP for years, we’ve recently joined SAP’s partner program. Our latest SAP offering is a SAP Fiori UI theme pack that helps customers visually integrate their OutSystems apps with other SAP applications.

By leveraging the SAP Fiori Theme to your OutSystems-built apps, you can provide your users with instant familiarity. It eliminates disruption, makes for easier training, and leads to a more productive experience.

Visual consistency may seem like a small thing, but it’s actually quite important. It speeds up decision-making and gives users a sense of reliability and stability. A consistent UI also prevents your users from having to learn new tricks or toggle back and forth between styles.

Here’s a side-by-side comparison illustrating the OutSystems user interface before and after the SAP Fiori Theme is applied.

outsystems user interface before and after the sap fiori theme is applied

SAP Fiori Theme Tutorial: How to Get Started

The SAP Fiori Theme enables you to build OutSystems applications that have a similar look and feel to an SAP web app. Your applications’ icons, fonts, colors, and dialog boxes can all follow the SAP Fiori design system. If you haven’t already, you’ll need to install OutSystems UI version 2.0 or higher from Forge before you begin.

Here’s how you can take advantage of the SAP Fiori Theme — and build more seamless apps without disruption. (If you’re already an OutSystems customer with SAP extended apps, you can skip to step 3.)

  1. Becoming an OutSystems customer: If you’re already an OutSystems customer, great! (You can skip to step 2.) If you’re not currently a customer and you’re interested in seeing how a high-performance, low-code platform can enhance your existing SAP investment, schedule a demo today.
  2. Extending SAP: Build an app on top of SAP using the OutSystems platform.
  3. Installing the SAP Fiori Theme: Simply log into Service Studio, and click on Install From Forge. You can also go to the OutSystems Community > Forge to search for and install the app. Open the module you want to apply the app to, and apply the design to your module.
  4. Using the SAP Fiori Theme: Once installation is complete, you can start applying the new design. From the Elements tab, expand the Themes folders, and add the QuartzLight (the SAP Fiori Theme) to your existing Theme folder as the Base Theme. Click Publish to display widgets, buttons, and expressions with the SAP Fiori Theme.

Get the complete SAP Fiori Theme installation tutorial and detailed descriptions of the themes, layouts, patterns, and static entities that allow you to create an application with SAP Fiori.

Using High-Performance Low Code to Rebuild Your SAP Customizations

Meanwhile, as you’re preparing to migrate to S/4HANA, there’s another approach to handling the issues around SAP customizations to consider: Where will those customizations reside once you’ve completed the move? SAP. Rebuilding SAP customizations with OutSystems is for organizations who want to streamline their migration and keep the SAP Core clean particularly if you have an overburdened IT staff.

Consider how Ridgelinez Limited, a digital transformation consulting firm, was able to avoid heavy customization of the SAP system by using OutSystems, improving development productivity by three to five times. 

Rebuilding SAP customizations on the OutSystems low-code development platform allows you to deliver the changes needed by the business outside of SAP. Not only is this approach more cost-effective and less complex, but it keeps the SAP core clean so that the next migration goes off as quickly and seamlessly as possible.

Start Customizing with SAP Fiori for Free

OutSystems customers can download the SAP Fiori Theme for free. Start designing your OutSystems applications with the SAP Fiori look and feel to seamlessly integrate your visual experience with existing SAP web applications. Try the free edition of SAP Fiori Theme now.

Not an OutSystems customer yet? Download the free edition of the platform to see how you can modernize and extend the value of your SAP applications.