At SAP, we believe our success is contingent on how we make our customers successful. A lot of that has to do with giving customers the assets and tools to continually grow and learn in their journeys to becoming an intelligent enterprise.
Customers that focus on developing skills and continuous learning see significant success. An IDC study found that SAP customers investing in training and enablement gained significantly more value from their investment, endure 62 percent fewer support calls, increase user satisfaction by 15 percent, and take 11 percent less time to deploy their purchases – ultimately enabling more innovation than their competitors.
The right knowledge and skills are the foundation for using software sufficiently and effectively. Looking at SAP customers and partners, there are two major streams of value creation.
They learn before purchasing the product, investing into professional growth, conducting evaluation of products, and preparing buying decisions. They continue learning after purchase, pairing learning for the project teams, admins, and key and end users with the implementation of the product.
Both parties benefit from learning in the most efficient way: They create higher user satisfaction, increased productivity when using products, and faster implementation. Now more than ever, during rapidly changing times, SAP is focused on supporting customers, partners, and users with the right skills and learning opportunities to be successful.
The Impact of Learning Content
SAP Learning Hub provides 24/7 access to online learning content, interactive SAP Learning Rooms, and live SAP training systems in a public or private cloud environment. Over the past five years, the company has worked to provide customers and partners flexible and convenient ways for have easy access to content and tools dedicated to advancing their respective learning journeys.
SAP Learning Hub is also making an impact in driving proficiency and overall implementation success for a variety of customers.
“EY employees love SAP Learning Hub,” said Tim Fuller, Global SAP Go-to-Market Leader at Ernst & Young Global Limited. “There is monthly triple-digit growth in membership to the digital transformation learning room, for example. It saves time and money, and helps us stay on top of the SAP user market.”
Learning opportunities also play an important role in promoting employee buy-in, a key ingredient in successful product implementations.
“IBM, for example, recorded an average satisfaction score of 8.8 on a scale of one to 10, from 10,000 learners in China who had access to SAP Learning Hub during an SAP S/4HANA pilot project,” said Eva Zauke, chief knowledge officer and senior vice president of SAP Knowledge and Education at SAP.
Other success stories include German convenience wholesaler Lekkerland, which was able to propagate the skills and knowledge of its 150 key users to a total of 2,000 employees with SAP Enable Now, and consulting company Altran, which increased its certification success rate from 30 to 83 percent within one year through SAP Learning Hub.
Providing the Flexibility to Adapt Learning
An important aspect in encouraging employees and users to take advantage of learning opportunities is tailoring formats and content precisely to their needs. This means providing customers the flexibility to adapt training and learning to their liking.
Last year, SAP won the coveted Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) STAR Award for the SAP Enable Now Framework. This solution allows users to access help, tutorials, and guided tours from directly within applications, to edit content, and to create and distribute company-specific assets to users.
For example, SAP Enable Now Framework helps enable SAP customer ExxonMobil to share its learning content with a wider circle of end users: “In the past, we provided training for all our employees before a system implementation or update and then uploaded the materials we’d used in the classroom into the solution. Now, thanks to this in-app solution, we can continuously create and edit our learning assets, which means we can ensure that all our end users have access to precisely the information they need, whenever and wherever they need it.”
Looking Ahead Toward the Future
As customers drive digital transformation in their organizations and look to the future, creating a culture of learning will be of upmost importance.
The software industry is already tackling a shortage of people with key qualifications given the accelerated pace of technological change in the last decade. As artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning become more important to unlocking a data-rich world, organizations will meet even more challenges.
This is why so many organizations have focused on upskilling efforts and have deeply invested in tech training programs for current staff. As PwC points out in its 22nd Annual Global CEO Survey, “A culture of adaptability and lifelong learning will be crucial to spreading the benefits of AI and related technologies widely through society.”
SAP takes great pride in knowing that its training and learning offerings create value for customers and help drive adoption on their journeys to becoming intelligent enterprises.
