Also, find out the seven things you must do to ensure you are addressing your frontline warehouse workers’ needs when making warehouse management system (WMS) and workflow changes.

When you’re modernizing your SAP warehouse, it’s essential to put the execution experience of your warehouse workers first. After all, the performance of your connected frontline workers is one of the closest links to the satisfaction of your external customers.

If you can modernize your SAP warehouse so connected workers can execute their jobs faster, more efficiently, and more accurately, it naturally leads to better service experiences for your customers. Achieving those results requires adopting a frontline-first approach to your modernization efforts—and that means rethinking not just how SAP is accessed, but how warehouse work gets executed.

At Havensight Consulting, we develop SAP warehouse execution solutions for leading global warehouse operators, and we live this frontline-first focus every day. As we work with IT, management, and decision-makers to implement solutions compatible with their SAP tech stack—and help them migrate from paper to digital workflows, or from older SAP technology to SAP S/4HANA—we always emphasize the need to prioritize frontline execution experience.

Workers’ perception of the solution—and whether they believe it genuinely solves their challenges—will make or break any mobilization and modernization effort. If they don’t see it as helpful, they’ll resist. And resistance will never deliver the results you want, even if the solution technically does what you need it to. That’s why every decision must be grounded in the frontline execution experience, and we always recommend our clients do the same.

There are important technical considerations that come into play when building a warehouse execution experience that frontline workers will actually adopt—especially in an SAP environment. Let’s walk through the top seven things we recommend, regardless of what the final user experience needs to be.

Seven Things to Do When Modernizing Your SAP Warehouse

While this isn’t an exhaustive list, these are the same seven recommendations we make every time we sit down with IT and management-level decision-makers to talk about SAP warehouse execution and mobile workflows:

1. Choose SAP UI5 as Your Mobile Framework

We start here because this crucial technical decision determines how much you can streamline and optimize your frontline-first workflows—and whether you can support the remaining six things you’ll need to do to modernize your SAP warehouse.

When migrating or building new SAP mobile apps and execution experiences, avoid older platforms such as SAP’s ITS Mobile and SAP Console.

SAP recently introduced MOBGUI to support S/4HANA Extended Warehouse Management. While MOBGUI offers some improvement in end-user experience, it remains reliant on the underlying ITS Mobile architecture.

ITS Mobile and its predecessor, SAP Console, were revolutionary in their time—but they are no longer sustainable for creating optimal frontline execution experiences. ITS Mobile, which replaced SAP Console in 2007, is now approaching two decades old. Both platforms are significantly outdated.

SAP Fiori has key limitations and many of the same issues as ITS Mobile. Fiori is a collection of pre-built applets with consumer-style interfaces, but it shares challenges with ITS Mobile—including cluttered and complex mobile screens, peripheral device compatibility issues, and no offline capabilities. A critical limitation for warehouse use cases is that Fiori has no concept of a navigable menu, making it difficult to structure your interface for accessing multiple inventory transactions and functions.

Fiori’s role-based tile model assumes a siloed user who only completes one task in one area—with no way to access related transactions or functions. It works well for reducing specific role-based tasks to a few fields, but it’s not a good fit for warehouses where workers need to move fluidly across multiple transactions and areas.

To build warehouse execution apps with the best usability, the latest optimization tools, and offline capabilities, start with SAP UI5. This is SAP’s newest UI framework—field-tested and proven for over a decade.

SAP UI5 is native SAP technology, built on HTML5, enabling the creation of secure, modern, and highly responsive mobile apps and frontline execution experiences. It allows you to build cross-platform, enterprise-grade web applications more easily and efficiently—compatible with both SAP ECC and S/4HANA, with stronger authentication and security, and positioned as SAP’s preferred platform for long-term relevance.

SAP UI5 directly addresses the core issues of older technology like ITS Mobile: slow app response times, cluttered screen layouts, limited device compatibility, and the requirement to memorize transaction codes and function keys. With SAP UI5—and the right additional code—you can also build true enterprise-level offline capability into your warehouse execution apps.

With SAP UI5, you get sleek, simplified mobile interfaces with faster response times, no T-code memorization, stronger security, and an online experience with offline mode—keeping your workforce productive even without a network connection.

2. Simplify Your Mobile Workflows and Processes

One of the great advantages of SAP UI5’s web-based technology is that you can create vastly simpler and more efficient execution workflows—with fewer screens, fewer clicks, and fewer taps.

There’s no need to use function keys. You can eliminate virtually any unnecessary element from SAP’s backend modules, taking a minimalist approach that presents only the transactions, information, and features workers need—with an intuitive design, easy drop-down menus, and everything just a click or tap away.

SAP UI5 enables prebuilt and configurable workflow templates that support warehouse and inventory execution in SAP Inventory Management (IM), Warehouse Management (WM), and Extended Warehouse Management (EWM)—running on both SAP ECC and SAP S/4HANA. This approach is foundational to how Havensight Inventory One (H1) is built and deployed.

3. Create Guided and Optimized Execution Processes

While this may appear to be a UX recommendation, it’s critical to define the execution experience before mapping out the technical scope of the project. SAP UI5 allows you to build apps that intuitively guide and prompt users through tasks in the fastest, most efficient, and most accurate way—but you can’t define how those apps need to be built until you can describe exactly what that frontline worker’s experience needs to be.

With that clarity, everything else follows: screen layout structure, sequence, visual and audio prompts, data validation rules. These decisions ensure that the execution platform guides users and enforces best practices without friction.

This approach also accelerates onboarding. When workflows are guided and logical, new workers can complete tasks effectively on day one—without a steep learning curve from a technology perspective.

4. Ensure Offline Capabilities

In many warehouses, mobile signal is occasionally unavailable or temporarily interrupted due to network dead spots or outages. For connected frontline workers, this is a serious productivity killer. Once a connection is lost, an active session and any in-progress transactions are gone—workers must wait for connectivity to return, log back in, and start over.

To avoid these disruptions, offline capability must be built into your SAP warehouse execution platform.

ITS Mobile and Fiori offer no offline capability, even though Fiori is built on the SAP UI5 platform. However, by applying the right SAP UI5 code libraries and business logic, you can build apps that maintain each session and transaction even when the device’s connection is lost—allowing workers to complete tasks and re-sync with SAP once connectivity is restored.

This is a core capability built into Havensight Inventory One, ensuring uninterrupted execution inside the warehouse, in outdoor yards, and in remote or low-signal environments.

5. Use Modern Authentication and Security

Apps built on older SAP mobile platforms often rely on Telnet servers and non-standard SAP authentication, requiring software bridges to connect to SAP’s Internet Transaction Server and the SAP GUI. This creates serious security vulnerabilities for your organization.

SAP UI5 uses standard SAP authentication and the latest mobile authentication infrastructure—protecting your apps, data, and business without the technical risk of legacy security models. This alone is a compelling reason to modernize away from ITS Mobile and SAPConsole-era solutions.

6. Ensure Mobile Device and Operating System (OS) Compatibility

Your warehouse may rely on a variety of devices—mobile computers, wearables, barcode scanners, RFID readers, and tablets. Your SAP warehouse execution platform must support all of them, including varying form factors and operating systems.

Older SAP frameworks like SAP Console and ITS Mobile cannot meet this requirement. They don’t support voice-directed workflows, or the use of cameras, microphones, and Bluetooth connections. Even SAP’s Fiori solution doesn’t render reliably across all mobile devices or guarantee full access to device features.

SAP UI5, combined with the right development tooling, overcomes these limitations. It enables truly cross-platform SAP execution apps that support all mobile device types, screen sizes, and form factors—and makes full use of device capabilities.

Havensight Inventory One is built on SAP UI5 to ensure that every screen and workflow renders automatically and dynamically across devices of different sizes and form factors. H1 supports photo capture, video capture, mobile barcode printing, voice-enabled transactions, hands-free workflows, and a wide range of modern device capabilities—validated across Zebra’s device portfolio including the TC22, TC58, TC73, MC9300, and ET60.

7. Don’t Forget Multi-Language Support

Multi-language support is often overlooked in SAP warehouse modernization projects—but it’s essential for supporting a diverse workforce and making your warehouse a more attractive place to work. Workers who can operate in their native language are naturally more efficient, more confident, and more productive.

SAP UI5 supports multi-language applications without requiring coding changes. It provides resource bundles that store translatable text in multiple languages, and its resource model handles localization overrides—allowing different users to work in different languages within the same facility.

Building this in from the start ensures your execution platform scales with your workforce, not against it.

Start Designing for Better Execution Experiences

Hopefully, you’re already thinking about the types of frontline execution experiences you want to deliver as you modernize your SAP warehouse—and this guide helps you cover your bases as you plan and execute your workflow mobilization effort.

Havensight Inventory One is purpose-built around all seven of these principles. It’s not a GUI wrapper, a screen replacement, or a consulting engagement with custom code that nobody can maintain. It’s a configurable SAP-native warehouse execution platform—built on SAP UI5, designed for frontline adoption, and built to be deployed, maintained, and enhanced faster than anything custom-built in SAP can offer.

If you’d like to learn more about how to execute these key requirements, or want guidance on which SAP technologies and tools may work best for your environment, connect with the team at Havensight Consulting.

For more tips on SAP mobile app development, workflow optimization, and key lessons from successful mobile upgrades at other warehouses, visit our consolidated page of SAP Mobile Apps and Migration Resources.

Frequently Asked Questions About Frontline SAP Warehouse Execution