Africa has been an early adopter of business software firm SAP’s user experience improvement offering Fiori.

This is according to the chief executive officer of SAP Africa, Pfungwa Serima, speaking to ITWeb Africa along the sidelines of the SAPPHIRE NOW 2014 business software conference in Orlando, Florida.

This week the company announced its Fiori user experience (UX) and SAP Screen Personas software are planned to be included within underlying licences of SAP software.

SAP Fiori was launched last year as a collection of apps with a “consumer-like UX to improve the user experience of core SAP software functions.”

“We were the first in EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa), in fact, if not one of the first few regions to invest in Fiori, and that talks to obviously how relevant the whole Fiori user interface is to our customers,” Serima told ITWeb Africa.

“And it was a South African company by the way,” Serima said; although he did not disclose which firm started using the solution in SA.

Serima explained that increasing forces of globalisation in Africa are pushing SAP customers to adopt more dashboard-like solutions as well.

“Look at some of the work that our partners have done beyond Fiori, like the whole analytics dashboard play.”

“There’s been a lot of work that’s not just taken place in South Africa by the way, but in places like Kenya, where there’s been a lot of work partners who are going into solution provision for customers.

“A dashboard becomes a crucial solution of what they offer,” said Serima.