SAP Enable Now is SAP’s solution for increasing adoption and raising productivity. Here, solution owner Kristina Kunad shares how it provides in-application help and training capabilities to help customers improve productivity, user adoption, and user experience as well as increase end-user satisfaction.
In this Q&A, Kunad discusses how the demand for in-application help and training capabilities has changed, especially over the past two years with the challenges of a global pandemic and millions of SAP users working from home. She also explains new functionalities and how customers can benefit even more from this great solution.
Q: In your role as solution owner of SAP Enable Now, what have been your observations over the past two years, when businesses were struggling with the impact of the pandemic?
A: I noticed several interesting trends during the pandemic. Some businesses had challenges from not being ready to respond in a fast and agile way to the new situation – for example their entire workforce working from home suddenly or not being ready to boost their digital transformation, enhance their rollouts, or implement new business models within a very short time frame. On the other hand, I observed that some of our customers accelerated their investment in user enablement and training.
The reasons seem obvious. They wanted to make a good use of the time they suddenly had due to the circumstances, time which they would normally have invested in their own customer projects. Instead, some customers decided to kick off long-term projects on user enablement earlier than originally planned. In other cases, we noticed a change in how user enablement is valued. The unpredictable change due to the pandemic and entire workforces suddenly working from home revealed gaps and needs for upskilling. The help system of colleagues at the next desk suddenly fell away. User enablement and upskilling became priority tasks for many. To help customers respond to this in a fast and agile manner, SAP Enable Now offers a range of possibilities to help overcome those gaps and needs.
Sounds like some businesses managed to turn their challenges into something positive by installing or enhancing the use of SAP Enable Now. How would you summarize the key features of this in-application help in one sentence?
SAP Enable Now helps customers easily create, maintain, and deliver in-application help, learning materials, and documentation for existing applications as well as for the rollout of new features or solutions.
What is the unique selling proposition for SAP customers when working with SAP Enable Now?
There are many good reasons that come to my mind, let me mention a few. SAP Enable Now is already integrated in many SAP solutions. For example, RISE with SAP customers automatically have access to SAP-generated content available via SAP Companion* in-application help. There are many more solutions already equipped with this great help and customers can also enhance it.
The second aspect is that we have a huge volume of ready-to-use content available, which saves our customers time as they will not have to create the content themselves but can basically hit the ground running from day one. SAP Companion works like a digital assistant for users, aiming to simplify and ease the consumption of our solution. It is available for browser-based solutions, for in-application help for non-browser-based solutions, and even for non-SAP solutions in general. SAP Enable Now offers many ways to create enablement content – from interactive quizzes to e-learnings with text-to-speech over customized documents. Finally, I would like to mention that our customers can use SAP Enable Now across their whole portfolio with just one license per user. This breadth of possibilities has something for every use case.
This all sounds easy to apply, easy to consume, and easy to use. What do you hear from customers about recent enhancements?
What I hear most of the time is “Please give us more of this.” Customers love the direction we’re heading in, and our vision of an intelligent adoption platform resonates. Be it fine-tuning our existing feature set with enhancements like the push help and what’s new banner configuration or coming up with completely new features like machine translation integration, we seem to have hit a sweet spot, especially with in-app help delivered by SAP Companion.
With a more flexible approach for new releases, more proactive customer communication, and our lively user enablement community, we continuously listen to our customers to best respond to their needs. This is not just about the features; it’s also about being a companion for our customers on their way to better adoption and productivity.
You indicated how important user enablement is to fully unfold the benefits of a solution and to help increase the overall performance of users. What are one or two things that you would like customers to be aware of?
First, I would like to point out that customers can use SAP Enable Now for a huge number of SAP solutions. It’s even part of the built-in application help, like with SAP S/4HANA, where they can benefit from the pre-created ready-to-use content.
They can also use SAP Enable Now for any other kind of enablement and training content they want to create, depending on the individual business needs of an organization or department.
Let’s say a company runs different SAP applications, for example SAP SuccessFactors solutions, plus their own custom-built applications. SAP Enable Now could be used for all of them.
Often customer departments tend to act in silos when it comes to implementing training and enablement software. HR might consider using SAP Enable Now for SAP Success Factors Onboarding, for example, while the procurement department might not be aware that they could also use SAP Enable Now – and with the benefit of not having to add additional licenses.
To fully benefit from SAP Enable Now installations across departments within one organization, we strive to help our customers to close the gaps between departments, teams, and license usage, and to help them make best use of SAP Enable Now.
Sophia Stolze is integrated communications manager for SAP Enterprise Adoption at SAP SE.
*SAP Companion will replace “Web assistant” to provide a harmonized and more descriptive name for in-application help channels provided by SAP Enable Now.