Many years ago, I was on a long call with a Gateway technician helping me to save my hard drive. While various operations were running, she regaled me with stories, either lived or recounted by others, of strange help desk calls. The client whose foot-pedal didn’t work (it was the mouse). The client whose cup holder was broken (the CD tray). The client who only got a black screen (the video wasn’t plugged in). And finally, everyone’s favorite: the client who for the life of him could not find the Any key.
The hour I spent with the Gateway technician cost my company nothing nor were the aforementioned callers charged for their queries because none of us were using in-house help desk. For those of you with an in-house SAP help desk, we have to ask the question: how much of your time is spent explaining that a mouse is not a foot pedal and a CD tray is not a cup holder?
On many occasions, I have had the fascinating task of assessing a client’s SAP help desk statistics. Call volume, average call time, average resolution time, and the like are invariably categorized but I have yet to see the category “mindless waste of time” so I have no statistical handle on the frequency of such calls in an SAP environment.
However, there has been one simple trend to every help desk analysis I have ever been a part of and that is the very high percentage of calls that relate to “end user training”. That is to say, calls that would not be necessary if end users were properly trained and supported.
This “revelation” came to me back in 2002 when I was a speaker at a searchSAP event in London. There were more than 300 attendees and I asked them to raise their hands if they’d had SAP for three or more years. Nearly all hands went up. I then asked them to keep their hands up if, in the past year, they had provided their end user base any formal refresher training. All hands went down. After a few seconds, everyone burst into embarrassed laughter.
On average, clients invest only 4% to 5% of their implementation budget on training of which about 50% is dedicated to the end users with the rest going to the internal project team and to executive awareness. Worse, since end user training is the penultimate step before go-live and both budgets and schedules are stretched thin, many clients cheap out and provide foreshortened training. There is no justification for this and the failure to adequately train users is often relegated to a hopeful “they’ll sort it all out” attitude.
The result is that users are hesitant, slow, unaware of their role in fulfilling a business process, and perhaps resentful. Since they are at the source of actual SAP performance, the entire investment is undermined. If they can’t find the Any key, they will call your help desk. And what will be said?
Past research about SAP user competency yielded this great nugget: in response to two questions:
1) Who in your firm is responsible for ongoing end user competency?
2) Who is your firm has budget for ongoing end user competency?
By far, the most frequent answers were a) Don’t Know and b) No One. No other reply, either for Human Resources, SAP managers, business managers, or process managers was higher than 5%.
Parallel research asked SAP managers what next steps they planned to take to further their SAP maturity. Overwhelming response: buy more applications software.
And another round of Any keys.
Adapted from excerpts of The SAP Green Book: Weathering the Global Fiscal Crisis with SAP. Michael Doane 2009, all rights reserved.
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