Fact Sheets

SAP's early SAP Fiori documentation named three application types: transactional apps, analytical apps and fact sheets. A fact sheet answered one question: what do I need to know about this object? It showed a header and the key facts of a single business object, such as a material, a supplier invoice or a purchase requisition item, and offered links:

• to fact sheets of related objects, such as the supplier behind an invoice;
• to transactional apps that change the object;
• to back-end transactions for details the fact sheet did not show.

Fact sheets were display-oriented. Changes happened in the linked apps or transactions, not in the fact sheet itself. A fact sheet was therefore a navigation hub for one object, not a place to process it.

In SAP Business Suite, fact sheets were tied to SAP Fiori search:

1. Search models in the ABAP back end, part of the embedded search technology, described a business object and the data around it.
2. A user searched in the SAP Fiori Launchpad; the search results list was the main entry point to fact sheets.
3. Choosing a result opened the fact sheet, which read its data through the search model and could include data from other fact sheets.
4. Other apps could also open a fact sheet through an intent with an action such as displayFactSheet.

Because of this design, setting up SAP Fiori search was a prerequisite for fact sheets, and SAP stated that fact sheets ran only on SAP HANA and the ABAP stack. A missing fact sheet was therefore often a search setup problem rather than an app problem.

SAP S/4HANA did not drop the label at once, but the role moved to object pages built with SAP Fiori elements. The SAP Fiori Apps Reference Library shows the transition:

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition had its own Employee Fact Sheet, deprecated in 2308 and deleted in 2408 in favor of the Worker Overview app. The library groups the remaining apps under the type "SAP Fiori - Object page / Fact sheet"; retirements are announced app by app, so check each app's entry. In SAP S/4HANA, a fact sheet is best read as a predecessor of the object page.

Fact sheets surface in upgrades as broken tiles or links. A short path helps:

1. Find the successor. Look up each fact sheet in the SAP Fiori Apps Reference Library; deleted apps usually name the replacement, such as Manage Journal Entries for F1732.
2. Clean the catalogs. Remove references to deleted or deprecated apps from custom business catalogs with the launchpad content manager (/UI2/FLPCM_CUST).
3. Check custom links. Custom apps that navigate with a displayFactSheet intent fail once no target mapping matches; run /UI2/FLIA for an affected user to confirm.
4. Retest search. Users who reached objects through search results may need a new path, such as a list report.

A common mistake is to fix only the tiles and forget in-app links, which keep pointing at fact sheets that no longer exist.