A number of my former colleagues have long labored selling SAP end user training courses. The value of their courseware is huge but that value is chronically rejected. Years ago, in a study of 120 firms in the installed base, two of my questions were: 1. Who in your firm is responsible for SAP end user competency? 2. Who in your firm controls the budget for SAP end user training? When responses were expressed in bar charts, the bars for “Don’t Know” and “No One” towered over the others (IT director, HR director, VP of ERP, CIO, et al).
Excerpted from The SAP Green Book, Thrive After Go-Live (due September 15, 2009)
Some years ago, I wrote a brief article entitled “Shop Till You Drop at the ERP Mall”. It was inspired by research, both primary and direct, into the ERP installed base (SAP, PeopleSoft, and Oracle). The research revealed that, after Go-Live, a large percentage of firms tended to buy more applications software to the detriment of stabilizing their existing ERP platform through business process improvements, end user training, data synchronization, and the like. In short, rather than addressing the problems listed in the table above, they merely up the ante.
There is one solution that is by fair the most effective and also the rarest. Train your users. Not only prior to Go-Live but continually thereafter.
This “revelation” came to me back in 2002 when I was a speaker at a searchSAP event in London. There were more than 300 attendees and I asked them to raise their hands if they’d had SAP for three or more years. Nearly all hands went up. I then asked them to keep their hands up if, in the past year, they had provided their end user base any formal refresher training. All hands went down. After a few seconds, everyone burst into embarrassed laughter.
The joke is on us.
On average, clients invest only 4% to 5% of their implementation budget on training of which about 50% is dedicated to the end users with the rest going to the internal project team and to executive awareness. Worse, since end user training is the penultimate step before Go-Live and both budgets and schedules are stretched thin, many clients cheap out and provide foreshortened training. Addressing a budget shortfall at the expense of subsequent user competence is a poor trade-off and is usually followed with a hopeful “they’ll sort it all out” attitude.
The result is that users are hesitant, slow, unaware of their role in fulfilling a business process, and perhaps resentful. Since they are at the source of your SAP business process fulfillment, you will have undermined the entire investment.
Wise firms cultivate a culture in which the efficient deployment of SAP applications is constantly reviewed and refined. It is probable that your firm spent 5% or less of its implementation budget on end user training. It is equally probable that you have no formal budget whatsoever for ongoing training.
This “revelation” came to me back in 2002 when I was a speaker at a searchSAP event in London. There were more than 300 attendees and I asked them to raise their hands if they’d had SAP for three or more years. Nearly all hands went up. I then asked them to keep their hands up if, in the past year, they had provided their end user base any formal refresher training. All hands went down. After a few seconds, everyone burst into embarrassed laughter.
The joke is on us.
On average, clients invest only 4% to 5% of their implementation budget on training of which about 50% is dedicated to the end users with the rest going to the internal project team and to executive awareness. Worse, since end user training is the penultimate step before Go-Live and both budgets and schedules are stretched thin, many clients cheap out and provide foreshortened training. Addressing a budget shortfall at the expense of subsequent user competence is a poor trade-off and is usually followed with a hopeful “they’ll sort it all out” attitude.
The result is that users are hesitant, slow, unaware of their role in fulfilling a business process, and perhaps resentful. Since they are at the source of your SAP business process fulfillment, you will have undermined the entire investment.
Wise firms cultivate a culture in which the efficient deployment of SAP applications is constantly reviewed and refined. It is probable that your firm spent 5% or less of its implementation budget on end user training. It is equally probable that you have no formal budget whatsoever for ongoing training.
Excerpted from The SAP Green Book, Thrive After Go-Live (due September 15, 2009)