Many companies are implementing SAP S/4HANA® in support of their digital transformation goals. However, transformation isn’t just about implementing SAP S/4HANA technology, it’s about fundamentally changing the ways employees leverage that technology to produce business outcomes. These fundamental changes do not just happen – organizations must put purposeful and effective solutions in place to enable them.
Enrollment in the Transformation
Change management for SAP S/4HANA is about more than communicating change – it is about achieving commitment to the fundamental business and process changes that SAP S/4HANA enables. Even if your organization has executed organizational change management (OCM) successfully in the past, for true success with SAP S/4HANA, you must reexamine your approach. Here are some fundamental questions from SAP Education transformation professionals to help you better understand the impact of the change your organization is undertaking:
- To what extent will SAP S/4HANA require modifications to mindsets, or will change be limited to methods, systems, and behaviors? Changes to mindsets are usually required for transformational change and require a different approach to OCM.
- Will significant changes be required across a large span of the organization? Or will fewer changes be required? Or is only a small span of the organization affected? The broader the change impact, the more transformational it will be.
- To what extent are the right answers known for the business decisions your organization must make? With transformational change, there may be no single right answer or there may be many right answers.
- To what extent will the transition require a shift in the way the organization is managed? Transformational changes often require significant political changes, making them far more complex.
- Is there the possibility that a significant number of people will be unwilling or unable to complete the transformation journey? What impact might this have on the organization? Transformational OCM can help you address and mitigate these risks.
Just how is transformational OCM different from what you may have done in the past? At its core, transformational OCM measures progress not by task completion, but by commitment achieved. It goes beyond traditional OCM activities to focus on strategy execution. And key to the success of this level of change is an integrated strategy and well-designed plan to develop sufficient levels of understanding, commitment, and alignment.
Evolution of Learning
By its very nature, SAP S/4HANA brings continuously improving processes and technology to meet the evolving requirements of users. To keep up with this progress, organizations need a faster pace of learning enabled by new learning approaches supported by new technologies. SAP Education learning solutions for SAP S/4HANA work together to provide an agile, seamless learning experience for employees. This outcomes-based approach helps ensure that employees are focused on the right things, equipped to respond to change, and enabled to produce outcomes of value in an agile SAP S/4HANA environment.
Time-of-need Learning and Performance Support
If you’ve ever used a YouTube video to learn how to do something, you will understand the fundamental change in how employees will perform many functions in the SAP S/4HANA world. Many job tasks are easier to perform in the SAP Fiori® interface, but employees may still need information on new processes and responsibilities – especially for something they do infrequently or for tasks that have recently changed. Instead of sending employees back to the classroom or requiring them take more e-learning, SAP Education delivers a transition to “just-in-time” learning at the point of need. Through the use of microlearning and the enhanced performance support of the SAP Workforce Performance Builder Web assistant, employees receive personalized time-of-need learning and customized, context-sensitive online help that delivers just what they need to do their job. For example, in the area of procurement, in lieu of classroom training or e-learning, employees responsible for requisitioning learn how to create a requisition in a short learning intervention when they create their first requisition. This agile, just-in-time approach helps minimize time away from the job and maximize learning effectiveness.
Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing
SAP S/4HANA is all about live information and insights – a key promise of the software is that it empowers employees to continuously identify better ways to meet customers’ needs. Critical to this promise is the ability of employees to share their insights, and SAP Education provides the solutions to enable this collaboration and knowledge sharing. SAP Jam is a collaboration tool that can serve as the framework for user communities focused on both problem solving and leveraging SAP S/4HANA best practices. Share and consume updates and knowledge within the professional community in an organized and disciplined way. Within the context of a community of practice, SAP Jam can also be used to point learners to relevant SAP Learning Hub content, which provides the latest information on the evolution of SAP S/4HANA.
Performance Measurement and Continuous Improvement
Optimize the performance and adoption of your SAP software by measuring the performance of users and achieving operational excellence with the SAP User Experience Management application by Knoa (SAP UEM by Knoa). Beyond measuring user adoption, SAP UEM monitors interactions between users and applications and collects contextual information to identify user issues. The data collected by SAP UEM can be used to identify problem areas for both task performance and creation of desired business outcomes. The resulting data-driven decisions are not just feelings and perceptions and can be used to improve user productivity. Targeted learning solutions can then be created to address these performance areas and be distributed through SAP Workforce Performance Builder, SAP Jam, or a super user network.
