Atmos, Matrix and Fiori

This "perpetual motion machine" is more of a physical wonder than a pendulum clock. According to factory specifications, it is designed to run for 600 years. However, due to environmental influences, you should have this grandfather clock professionally cleaned every ten years. This beauty, precision, reliability and, of course, perpetual motion should also apply to SAP software. Of course, not everything was better in the past, but R/3 Enterprise was already very similar to an Atmos. S/4 is still far from the robustness of past ERP days. More and more often, the question arises as to whether SAP is still pursuing the old and proven goal of holistic, standard business software.

"What do you mean your good old R/3 was similar to a perpetual motion machine?" I sit with my wife in front of the Atmos and try to explain: A machine that was started once and then runs forever, even doing work as our Atmos moves the hour and minute hands, cannot physically exist.

And already the best of wives interrupts me: "For something that can't exist, this nothing was pretty expensive! Fascinated, I look at the pendulum movements of the Atmos and emphasize that it only appears to be.

The Atmos draws the necessary energy from the change in the surrounding air temperature. The temperature fluctuations are converted into mechanical energy, with which the Atmos is "wound up" and ultimately operates the pendulum.

From a practical point of view, it is a perpetual motion machine; theoretically, by its very nature, the energy level in a closed system always remains constant, and so even the Atmos cannot gain energy and move the clock hands out of nothing. "For me it remains a beautiful miracle", my wife concludes this physics lesson.

SAP Fiori is far from following a perpetual motion idea - even if the new design interface has won an industry award. What Hasso Plattner once postulated has never arrived in operational SAP life: operating an S/4 system without manuals!

Of course, the Fiori user interfaces can be used by anyone on screen, tablet and smartphone, but this does not mean that anyone understands and can operate the complex S/4 business processes. Swiping, typing, zooming and sending messages is possible for everyone with Fiori UI, but working meaningfully and productively is hardly possible.

The ongoing excitement about Fiori and the optimal UI for efficient work reminds me of a scene in the first part of the Matrix movie trilogy. Neo is exploring the ship Nebuchadnezzar and observes that one of the operators is sitting in front of screens with only green letters and numbers flickering across them - which immediately reminds me of my computer science studies and the old PDP-11 from DEC.

The operator tells Neo that this is the matrix, but to visualize it - today we would say "render" - the computer power is missing. How much power is spent on Fiori? Should we in the SAP community really die in beauty because productivity is lost with SAP's UI5?

The advantage of Fiori is that no one freezes with fright when they first come into contact with S/4. After a familiarization and learning phase, however, disillusionment and disappointment set in because fast, forward-looking, productive, efficient and simple work with the colorful boxes and symbols is hardly possible.

The energy-wasting Fiori design failed to consider and ultimately implement the learning curve of its users. Fiori is not a self-runner in the sense of a perpetual motion machine, but a stumbling block for productivity and efficiency.

And the energy issue (see matrix) is very real: On older tablets and weak PCs, a "modern" Fiori interface is hardly usable and operable. And the load on our data line is also growing due to the energy hunger of SAP's Fiori applications, which is reflected in numerous complaint e-mails from our Chinese branches. Only expensive VPN installations can help here.