Customers need more than just outstanding software products to get the desired business value from their investment. SAP Enterprise Adoption provides the key capabilities necessary for fast adoption and empowers customers to succeed locally and globally by delivering an exceptional localization experience across SAP solutions.
If purchasing enterprise software can be likened to putting tires on a car, adopting it stands for all the nuts and bolts that need to be tightened for the perfect fit.
As Eva Zauke, senior vice president and global head of SAP Enterprise Adoption, says: “A company can provide the most excellent and refined products. But if they are not fully adopted by the customer, it will not be possible to reap all the value they promise. For companies to make the transformation to the Intelligent Enterprise a success, business value realization needs to be at the center of the digital journey. From a customer’s perspective, adoption is key to realizing business value.”
With responsibility for quality management, globalization services, and user enablement, SAP Enterprise Adoption is contributing to the success of SAP solutions and ultimately to the success of SAP customers.
“SAP Enterprise Adoption is providing the key ingredients to help SAP’s customers to drive adoption and to create value with the Intelligent Enterprise,” Zauke says.
Focused on Quality
Cloud raises customer expectations for quality of software. Customers expect ease of use with a consistent user interface (UI) across products and embedded enablement. Cloud promises flexibility and scalability, requiring high system performance and availability.
“As customer expectations about software change with cloud solutions, quality and compliance are criteria customers increasingly pay attention to in the decision-making process to purchase software,” Zauke explains. “SAP is taking a comprehensive view on quality along the software life cycle that matters to our customers. This includes high availability and performance, robust data security, ease of implementation and integration, user experience, and superior functionality.”
Enabling the SAP User Leads to Higher Productivity
Even without a pandemic, roll outs of new technologies and processes can be challenging for companies. “Introducing a new business process without planning ahead for user enablement is simply not possible,” Zauke says. “The most successful companies are those that make the technical go-live the point in time when their users are enabled, and actively plan for a fast user on-boarding.”
Research shows that enabled users are not only 50% more productive when working with SAP applications, they are also 15% more satisfied with their work. One way to achieve broad user enablement is to collect and scale the knowledge of key users, as German retailer Lekkerland did for the implementation of SAP S/4HANA.
“These key users possess a very deep knowledge in Lekkerland’s business processes and can assess what the company needs beyond SAP standard,” Zauke explains. “Lekkerland captured this knowledge with SAP Enable Now and made it available to 2,000 business users.” These 2,000 employees were thus enabled to work with the software from day one of the go-live.
One of the largest American retailers uses SAP Enable Now to fully digitalize enablement for its more than 450,000 employees, meaning they no longer had to attend classroom sessions because the training was embedded into their daily onscreen working environment. Store employees received specific learning material to help them with customer contact during the pandemic.
Enabling the Success of Local and Global Businesses
As businesses have to be successful in a country as well as globally, they need support in achieving exactly this.
“Doing business in accordance with regulations and local laws is a typical challenge our global and local customers are facing,” Zauke confirms. “Let’s assume a global company wants to open a local subsidiary in Hungary or South Africa. They have to move forward quickly with a localized version of the software in use, while not compromising their global compliance, their best business practices, and statutory reporting.”
At the same time, the pandemic means that a variety of new laws and regulations were issued by governments that customers had to adhere to practically overnight.
While some software vendors may simply offer their products in the local language and call it “localized,” SAP has invested heavily in developing truly localized solutions, with country-specific versions that address not only language variations, but also localization of the respective business functions, compliance, local tax and payment rules, statutory reporting, local human resources (HR) solutions, and more. For example, SAP solutions include 64 local versions of SAP S/4HANA and 101 localized versions of SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central.
When SAP customer Nestlé opened a subsidiary in Brazil, they were faced with managing compliance with the Brazilian tax declaration framework.
“Brazil is considered to be the country with the most complex tax regulations worldwide,” Zauke says. “There are many details going into the tax calculation: where was the product developed, where does the material come from, who contributed, who will receive it – all these parameters have to be considered. These regulations had to be included in the Brazilian version of the SAP software Nestlé was using for them to be compliant with Brazilian tax law.”
Supported by SAP, Nestlé Brazil now manages tax data for more than 20 million invoices and 60,000 legal filings per year.
Adoption Drives Success
Solutions from the SAP Sports & Entertainment portfolio highlight the importance of adoption. Professional sport is a competitive environment, where maintaining and monitoring player performance has become very important. Digitalizing player performance and team management processes takes sports team management to a new level. SAP Sports One helps clubs and organizations digitalize sports performance management by coordinating all administrative, training, team management, scouting, and medical processes. Sport clubs can analyze and track player performance and players’ talent development and progress. Players, coaches, and scouts are empowered to collaborate on the go with intuitive, secure mobile team communications.
Professional athletes, coaches, and support staff want to focus on the sport itself and don’t necessarily need to be experts in software usage. They require a software solution that engages athletes and teams with innovative technologies that empower users with intuitive functionality and allow ease of use to enable adoption across the organization.
Zauke emphasizes the importance of adoption: “Adoption is key to getting the most out of SAP software. Or, in other words, adoption makes the digital transformation a success.”
