You’ve spent hundreds of man-days (not to mention a small fortune) on your SAP solution, and there’s more to follow with new projects coming down the line all the time.  There are more people using SAP than ever, doing more things on SAP within your organisation, but are they doing them right? Or, even at all?

Everyone agrees that having competent SAP users is important, and every project has some sort of user competency (or user readiness) milestone that has to be achieved at go-live.    However, the reality is that when the smoke clears after your big SAP initiative there is often some dissatisfaction from key stakeholders who tell you that users just don’t feel confident or competent with SAP.  Why is that?

Firstly, SAP end-user training still only happens at the initial time of implementation and can be quickly forgotten unless it’s reinforced when working on the live system.  Also, too much end-user training content just doesn’t match the post-go-live reality and very few companies have processes in place to periodically refresh this content. This means that even the most diligent users stop using it pretty quickly.  Finally, any new hires (or people changing roles) either don’t receive any sort of training on SAP or just have to sit next to another user for an hour (training professionals call this  “sitting with Nellie”).

Sound familiar?  Well, here are 5 practical steps you can take towards having confident and competent SAP users within your organisation:

1. Establish the right level of ownership.

Everyone has a vested interest in ensuring competent staff so you need to make sure that you spread things around a little rather ownership naturally gravitating towards the central SAP team.  Engage local “subject matter experts” (SMEs) and get them to look at the training content, and identify any learning gaps.  Encourage SMEs to supplement what’s available with additional “bite-sized” training content (e.g. a quick reference sheet, or a FAQ) which is relevant to users.  These are important people so make sure that they’re enabled and supported to ensure appropriate coverage and consistency.

2. Look at what happens to new hires.

A recent survey suggested that having a more structured training program for new hires, actually made these employees happier and more confident.  Not to mention strengthening their feeling that they’re a good fit for both the job and the organisation. Make sure you have a basic SAP training program for new hires to get things off to the right start.

3. Use technology, but use it wisely.

Learning technology is developing all the time, with more and more tools that can help you analyse, and address user competency issues.  Also, over the next few years expect to see strong demand for social and mobile technology as the promise becomes a reality. Remember that users and SMEs need to buy into anything “new” that you introduce, so focus on technology that is easy to understand and use and will be quickly adopted rather than shelved.

4. Think process not project.

In the SAP world, we’ve all been conditioned with a project mentality, with milestones, start and end dates.  However, this simply doesn’t fit with the goals of achieving and sustaining a high level of SAP user competency as this requires a long-term focus which is hard-coded into the business to succeed.  I prefer to think of this as a set of interdependent processes which work together to achieve a positive outcome.  A process for training new starters, a process for keeping training content up-to-date, and so on.  Processes are refined and improved over the long term, whereas projects come and go.

5. Measure, monitor and develop your business case.

Most importantly don’t forget to regularly measure, and frequently monitor improvements in user confidence and competency.  Identifying the ROI for training generally requires more effort than for a hardware or software purchase, but without a robust business case, you won’t get to make significant headway in this area.   However, there is no limit to the potential ROI in this area as competent users tend to like their jobs more, customers who interact with well-trained employees tend to like their vendors better, and that can only be good news for everyone.