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By Wes Coleman | June 26, 2026
How To Simplify SAP Workflows on Your Mobile Devices
SAP enterprise systems provide the robust foundation that successful businesses rely on to manage, track, and process complex order, inventory, and industrial workflows. This centralized structure is highly optimized for strategic data management and core business operations.
To extend this powerful capability to mobile frontline workers in active warehouse and industrial environments, businesses need to pair their SAP backend with highly specialized mobile tools. By aligning SAP’s comprehensive data processing with mobile-first efficiency, organizations can eliminate operational friction; empowering on-the-move workers to complete tasks faster, more easily, and with maximum accuracy.
One of those tools is Liquid UI, a powerful platform from Synactive that helps companies mobilize and optimize SAP workflows on Zebra and other devices. To find out more about Liquid UI and how to simplify SAP mobile workflows, I sat down for a great discussion with Anthony (Tony) Holland, Senior Vice President of Global SAP Partnerships at Synactive, a leading developer of mobile solutions for SAP customers.
Where Friction Often Occurs Between SAP and Mobile Workers
According to Tony, who has been leading efforts at Synactive to optimize the SAP mobile experience for over 17 years, many warehouses and industrial operations are eager to drive faster, more automated, and highly accurate workflows on the frontline. To fully achieve this, businesses are focusing on streamlining their mobile-user interface; translating SAP’s robust enterprise capabilities into frictionless, high-velocity tasks for mobile workers.
Each transaction might require several steps across different screens, and, for someone trying to move orders and inventory quickly, those extra steps create friction. Additionally, in many industries and environments, workers are operating on the move, so they need mobile access to SAP in a different way.
This means that a lot of organizations want to modernize their mobile user experiences, and they want to streamline these tasks and processes and create more mobile freedom. But they don’t want to re-write the core SAP system, which can be expensive and risky.
How Liquid UI Solves the Challenges of SAP Mobile Workflows
Tony and his colleagues at Synactive developed the Liquid UI platform to simplify the way mobile workers interact with enterprise systems, including SAP. Liquid UI lets you easily create SAP mobile apps and workflows with fewer steps and fewer screens. You can use it to quickly design and deploy streamlined processes that often take place on a single screen that’s designed specifically for each task that a worker is performing.
This includes taking advantage of Zebra’s data capture and AI capabilities, which can further automate and reduce the number of steps and the amount of time to complete each task. This happens by leveraging barcode scans, RFID, and even AI-driven optical character recognition (OCR) to capture text.
Instead of having workers navigate several SAP screens, workflows are completed much faster and more efficiently, with enhanced data capture to help automate and error-proof each process. Crucially, Liquid UI features extensions that enable your apps and workflows to communicate with SAP in the background. This allows mobile workers to complete tasks and transactions seamlessly, even with intermittent connectivity.
Examples of How Simple SAP Mobile Workflows Can Be
In our discussion, Tony gave some great examples of how all of this can work and how much easier and more efficient SAP mobile processes can be for frontline workers. This includes simplified processes where warehouse work orders and item locations are downloaded to a Zebra device.
A worker can scan a location barcode on the shelf and/or conduct an RFID scan of the designated area, and the mobile UI pulls the relevant SAP data and displays a simplified screen showing the items and quantity required. The worker picks the items and scans or reads them, and the mobile UI validates them against the SAP system in real time, confirming the pick and automatically moving the worker to the next task.
All of this happens in just a single screen or two, with minimal steps. And the UI handles communication with SAP in the background, and AI guides workers through each process, helping to ensure efficiency, accuracy, and manage exceptions.
To hear the full conversation and delve deeper into these capabilities, including additional SAP mobile challenges that you can solve, and insights for both SAP users and Zebra partners, I encourage you to watch the podcast below, or listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.
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