5 Reasons your SAP training is ineffective

SAP training, proper user onboarding, and education are paramount to the success of any organization that aims to deliver winning projects as well as drive higher employee engagement and user satisfaction. Research shows that most C level executive and HR leaders view empowering and enabling employees as vital towards achieving organizational goals and gaining competitive advantage. Sadly, reality tells a different story.

Statistics you should know for Digital Adoption Success

Gallup polls show only 14% of employees are highly engaged, and 1 in 3 people quit within their first year. Out of those, 70% state that training and development opportunities influence their decisions to stay. Another survey shows that employees are only able to apply 12% of what they learned in training. All of this comes at a very high cost. PWC estimates the cost of losing that employee in year 1 can be as high as 3x their salary.

Add in the cost of developing ineffective training techniques that do not align with the business needs or users expectations and learning styles and the average organizations stands to lose $13.5m per year, per 1,000 employees according to Grovo.

In Summary: Training directly relates to employee retention and engagement without which organizations wither and die. If employee performance support and training is ignored or not well executed, the consequences are dire.

Now that we have established the importance of good training and quantified some of the adverse effects of neglecting it, let’s take a look at typical training pitfalls and how you can avoid them in your organization.

Reason #1 You still use Traditional Instructor Led Training as the main conduit to educate users.

The problem with this approach is that it is not sufficient on its own. It has been proven by many scientific studies that the retention rates gravely decline with an hour after the training and after a week if the information is not revisited regularly it is mostly completely forgotten. Users only exposed to instructor based sap training will struggle greatly to recall the information when the need eventually arises. This is especially true for new projects and business processes or seasonal processes that are not used often.

Reason #2 You still use Word, PowerPoint and PDF to distribute knowledge.

The issue here is not the format but rather the accessibility and manageability of these documents. Even if you have invested in an LMS system you will find that most users especially less tech savvy ones will have a hard time locating the information and often default to creating a support ticket or asking an SME for help. This creates added burden on your support organization and scarce super users.  This is particularly applicable with SAP training.

Reason#3 Overloaded key users.

Most organizations and executives are looking for ways to free up resources and delegate them to higher more strategic tasks. They have large budgets allocated towards digital transformation, operational efficiency projects and RPA initiatives.  These are typically undertaken over several years with mixed results. Applying lean principles and optimizing at the bottleneck first allows a company to maintain the agility needed while the major initiatives evolve. In other words go after the low hanging fruit first! Ask your SAP super users what they spend most of their time on and you’ll quickly find out that putting out fires or helping less knowledgeable users ends up taking the majority of their days.

Reason#4 Constant business changes.

It is safe to assume that change is the only constant in any business environment. The best companies have adopted agile principles and implemented change management processes to try to cope. Keeping up with the pace of change however and bringing an entire organization constantly and consistently up to speed is no easy task. It requires proper communication and processes. It also requires re-training and maintaining thousands of documents and artifacts scattered across the enterprise. This is both costly and ineffective without the proper tools too quickly and easily identify changes, make them and propagate them in batches.

Reason#5 You use a limited approach.

People don’t learn the same way so how can you provide them one method and expect consistent results. Unless blended learning is offered, organizations will continue to have issues with user adoption and project rollout success rates. Corporate training effectiveness can be greatly enhanced with smart additions to the learning process.

In the last couple of years, this blended learning approach and the user of performance support systems has helped organizations provide just in time information in small manageable chunks to reinforce what was learned in the classroom.

Some tools have done it through e-learning, web based training (WBT) or simulations or on the spot walkthroughs and step by step help. Using step by step in-application guides as a supplement can save time and increase engagement because the users do not have to go find the information nor have to spend time running through a simulation before achieving their aim. Instead, they are directly assisted in their production system to properly execute the business process.