Investing in SAP S/4HANA? Your people need to be part of the investment too.
You’ve engaged your system integration partner, signed the statement of work, and have begun looking at integration and requirements. But have you thought about what SAP S/4HANA means for your employees, and how they’re impacted?
Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERPs) are complex and will change the way people in your organisation do their job. You must engage your workforce early and frequently to ensure successful adoption and maximise the return on your technology investment.
Start by giving your SAP S/4HANA program credibility.
When you initially introduce the fact that you’re implementing a new ERP, you will likely encounter some form of resistance. People will often say, “Why are we doing this? The system we have now is fine.” This is especially true for organisations that have been using their current ERP for a long time.
To overcome this resistance, you need to agree on a clear and compelling reason for implementing SAP S/4HANA that makes sense to your workforce. Find a bugbear in the organisation and aim to exploit it. Some common reasons for implementing SAP S/4HANA that we’ve experienced are:
Our current ERP is dated, and it no longer supports current processes and ways of working.
We have several systems doing similar things, and it will be more economical to replace them all with one system.
Our current system is slow, and we need to be doing things better and faster.
We want to get the foundations in place so the organisation can better respond to regulatory changes.
As an example, your clear and compelling reason for change may be along the lines of, “With SAP, we can eliminate thousands of hours of manual and repetitive administration work and give you that time back to better serve our customers”. This case for change may then be tailored to different stakeholders to ensure it is meaningful and resonates for them.
Once you have the case for change (i.e., ‘why’ you are changing), coach your organisation’s leadership team to collectively understand that vision and then ‘sell the dream’ to others in your organisation. Your case for change should convey some form of urgency and invite curiosity and ‘buy-in’. Make sure you keep it as simple as possible by avoiding overly complex, technical jargon and IT terms. You will likely find it is very hard for people to be curious or get excited about an ERP system, and things like smarter contracts or faster work orders. You will need to get creative to build excitement. Consider short sharp engaging videos, thought-provoking messages on screen savers, and memes on your enterprise social networking service (e.g., Yammer and Slack).
Engage your people in the design process.
Involving stakeholders doesn’t mean asking for input from every single impacted person, and it doesn’t mean it has to be a long and arduous consultative process. Select representative ‘users’ (i.e., those stakeholders that will be working with the end solution) and involve them in the scoping and design workshops. Ask them questions to better understand how they will use a solution, what currently works and doesn’t work, and what the perfect solution would look like. Ultimately, taking the time to do this will mean the solution design will be relevant to the needs of the end-user and more focused on real business problems.
Role mapping is not only a technical necessity but also a critical engagement activity.
Whilst the allocation of system-based permissions (i.e., role mapping) is a very technical activity, it is extremely important to get right from an experience perspective. Inaccurate role mapping can result in a range of issues including exposing confidential information (e.g., performance and salary data). But most importantly, it impacts first impressions of the system. For example, if someone logs in and cannot access what they need to do their job, it impacts their perception of the system.
Role mapping is a large and complex exercise as system roles and security permissions need to be designed, mapped (i.e., assigned to individuals), and then maintained throughout the program. Do not underestimate the level of effort required to get this right and the importance of it for downstream activities (e.g., learning participation, role-based communication, etc.).
People need to understand how S/4HANA will change the way they do their work.
SAP is likely to completely upend how your organisation manages procurement, asset management, financial accounting, reporting, maintenance, and much more. Take the time to identify, understand, and map out each future state process including who’s involved, how they’ll do it, what they need to do, and importantly, what’s changed. Use every opportunity you can at this stage to also highlight the benefits of SAP, to truly sell it. For example, think automation, efficiency, mobile applications, less (or no) paperwork, and less data entry. Present this information as digestible user journeys rather than boring process maps and use these journey maps as a key input to training.
It’s not enough to give people a system training session and send them on their way. Start by undertaking some research and understanding what types of learning will work for your audience. Just-in-time tools such as quick user guides, videos, and in-system support, ensure people have information on hand when they need it. These tools are arguably more important than system training sessions, as people can struggle to recall what they have seen in the system training. Make these tools as accessible as possible and constantly remind people that they exist as people will need these tools on hand when they need to undertake a less frequent activity, such as setting up a purchase order or creating a position.
Don’t tell everyone about every change SAP S/4HANA will introduce.
Given the breadth of an ERP solution, it is very unlikely that everyone in the organisation needs to know about everything that’s changing. For example, your maintenance department doesn’t need to know or care about how the General Ledger process is changing, nor will a Contract Administrator need to understand how to schedule a work order.
Segment your stakeholders and break the change up into more manageable components, aligned to different system functionality and their associated business units (i.e., finance, procurement, maintenance, etc). Focus your efforts on helping these different groups understand what the change means for them day-to-day. Concentrate change delivery to specific groups aligned to the SAP functionality that is relevant for them.
Go live is only the beginning.
After implementation, provide old-fashioned hands-on support. Utilise floorwalkers, drop-in desks, or Microsoft Teams channels for Hypercare, to coach people through new processes and ensure people have the support they need at their fingertips, wherever they may be working. This doesn’t have to be a long-term setup, but if this can be provided for the first 2 to 4 weeks, it’s going to send the message that you’re serious about providing support to your people.
It's quite typical to not have everything ready at go live, or to have designed a roadmap of post-implementation improvement initiatives. It’s important to communicate this clearly to your audience so that they aren’t feeling underwhelmed by what the solution is looking like on day 1, or that a common bugbear has not be resolved.
Measure how ready your people are to transition to SAP S/4HANA.
If you don’t measure how you are going in engaging your people and preparing them for change, you’re flying blind and likely to be thrown some big curveballs right at go-live. A change readiness survey can quickly tell you where you have hot spots of resistance or where your message isn’t getting through.
An adoption survey post go-live is an important way to check how the change has landed. In your survey, ask some of the questions outlined below:
Have you had access to sufficient training relevant to your role?
Do you know where to go to access information to help you do your job in ‘the new system’?
Was there an appropriate level of support in place following go-live of ‘the new system’?
Is ‘the new system’ effective to help you do your job?
How well was ‘the new system’ managed within your business area?
Most importantly – allocate budget to the ‘people stuff’.
Both our experience and research tell us that successful digital transformations require investment in change management (or the ‘people’ elements of transformation). However, organisations tend to underestimate the cost/benefit of change management in the planning and design phases, undercook the budget, and increase the overall risk to program viability and return on investment.
There is no magic number for how much you should spend on change management. At an absolute minimum you’re looking at 10 to 15% of your program budget and this will predominantly go towards resources to undertake the change management activity. But ultimately this budget is going to get your digital transformation over the line – if people can’t or won’t use the new system, what was the point?
Conclusion
ERPs like SAP S/4HANA are complex and will change the way people in your organisation do their job. Implementing the system is easy. Getting your employees to understand the new world and adopt the changes is the hard part. You must engage your workforce early and frequently to ensure successful adoption and maximise the return on your technology investment.
Start by setting a compelling case for change and future state vision that resonates with your workforce. This step is essential to give your program credibility. Segment your audience so you don’t have to tell everyone about every change that the new system will bring. This will ensure people remain engaged. Design your solution with the audience; it is for them after all. Go beyond just providing system base training and think about what people need to know about the broader business processes. Finally, measure your progress and make improvements where you see fit and make sure you allocate budget!
If you need help with your SAP S/4HANA implementation or would like to talk to us about the services we provide, please get in touch.
TYSON CORRIGAN, DIRECTOR
Anna Mevel, Director