SAP has announced the findings of a June 2018 independent study commissioned by SAP and conducted by Forrester Consulting, “The Total Economic Impact of SAP Jam” which is freely available on SAP’s website.

The study, the third in five years, calculated the cost savings and business benefits of deploying SAP Jam across an enterprise. The average SAP Jam return on investment (ROI) increased by 18.5 percent from 2016 to 2018 as customers discovered new ways to utilize the collaboration platform and improve efficiencies.

Financial Benefit

Forrester conducted surveys of and interviewed existing SAP Jam customers for the TEI survey and conducted subsequent financial analysis, which revealed that organizations experienced benefits of nearly $31 million over three years versus costs of $4.2 million, adding up to a net present value (NPV) of $26.8 million and an ROI of 631 percent.

Before SAP Jam, customers had multi-tool, multi-vendor collaboration and intranet solutions. As a result, vital corporate information, data and expertise were siloed either organizationally or geographically, making it difficult to access and share. With SAP Jam, employees, customers and partners can solve business problems and make decisions using a cloud-based solution that provides collaboration tools that are linked to applications, processes and data.

New in 2018: The Modern, Collaborative Intranet

The 2018 study includes a new benefit area, intranet management, which SAP customers have recently started adopting SAP Jam for. Forrester calculated that without SAP Jam, companies would need an additional 22 IT resources to manage the intranet infrastructure. This is due to several factors including:

• The consolidation of multiple and/or regionally focused intranets which caused information to be not only siloed, but inaccessible to those outside of the area.
• The ability for content owners to be directly responsible for the management of and publishing of their content within SAP Jam, without IT’s traditional level of involvement. With SAP Jam as their intranet, IT can empower individuals, teams and entire departments to utilize their own business processes and content workflows for writing, reviewing and then directly publish on the home page of the intranet without having to go through a central content channel which would cause delay in publication.

Centralizing Knowledge Helps Revenue Generating Teams

Keeping pace with the increasing need for centralized knowledge platforms, SAP Jam enables customers to quickly access corporate knowledge and training materials. “The centralization of the collaboration program enables organizations to decrease the time it takes to find and share information to close deals, adding revenue while decreasing costs associated with common business processes such as onboarding new employees and responding to employee support issues” Forrester wrote in the study.

Tangible Business Results

The study points to several strategic areas where SAP Jam adds business value, specifically:

• 73 percent reduction in IT labor related to managing the corporate intranet: For a global organization, implementing cloud-based SAP Jam allows for the elimination of hundreds of on-premises servers. This resulted in significant cost savings for departments and groups across the organization who could now manage departmental content directly in SAP Jam without IT support. It must be noted that the 73 percent reduction is labor only and does not include hardware costs.
• 19 percent reduction in cost and time to train and onboard new employees: SAP Jam reduces the time and expense to train new employees by providing a community in which new hires can engage with one another, work together on onboarding activities, and receive support from experts in other departments.
• 14 percent decrease in support call volume: Using SAP Jam for support, employees can easily locate the best experts and info from across the company to find the answers they need; as a result, the platform reduced the volume of calls into the call center.
• 10 percent reduction in time for sales to close deals. Using SAP Jam within a sales department expedited the time team members spent searching for information, reducing about 10.5 hours across all team members in every deal enabling them to close more deals.
• Faster access to information and expertise: The average employee using SAP Jam was 16 percent more efficient. The collaboration platform decreased the number of hours per week spent emailing, searching for information, and awaiting responses across multiple departments, but particularly with sales and service departments.

Over the past few years, SAP Jam has taken collaboration technology to another level. As the digital enterprise continues to expand, it is more critical than ever for organizations to have collaboration tools that keep employees connected and productive and is shown in the several “unquantified benefits” identified by the researchers:

• Transforming organizational culture through the removal of barriers and hierarchies. SAP Jam provided a means for employees to quickly connect across geographies, teams and levels. Information posted on SAP Jam became available instantaneously to the right individuals, regardless of their department and title.
• Creating a means for a globally-distributed organization to unify their content and work. By replacing legacy platforms with SAP Jam, the organization was able to streamline content management and collaboration by providing a single space for all locations and teams globally.
• Increasing accountability among employees who contribute to a project. SAP Jam increased the visibility of the efforts of project team members. With that visibility came increased accountability both on the team and at personal levels.
• Improving access to information for the ever-increasing mobile workforce. Several mobile-dependent groups, including young, digital native employees, sales teams and employees who do not have desktop computers, benefited from the ability to access content from and collaborate on any device.

Daisy Hernandez is global vice president of Product Management, Enterprise Collaboration, at SAP