SAP Implementation

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March 11, 2011

Hi,

I am currently working for a company that will be implementing a generic SAP product. Approximately 3000 staff will be trained by our internal training team who already have some SAP Training experience and are responsible for all training activities relating to the project. I’m keen to understand which companies have been in a similar situation where they have used their own trainers as opposed to SAP training specialists.

I would appreciate it if you could share your high-level experiences on the following points:

·

At which point in the project did you begin scoping out the training?
What were your main dependencies?

·
What were the timelines for your delivery?

·
What factors affected training that you did not anticipate?

·
Did your UAT overlap with material design? If so, how did you manage this and what was the impact?

·
We have access to the SAP Productivity Pak, what are your experiences of this?

Thanks

Steven

3 Responses

User deleted says:

March 11, 2011 at 10:02 am

SAP

Stevie,

I was SAP Training Mgr when we rolled out SAP at 80 sites across Australia over a 2 yr period. There were between 1 and 10 sites going live simultaneously each month. Approx 1800 employees were trained in Sales, Inventory, Warehousing, Shipping and associated Financials.

Training scoped out approx 12months before first site.

I do not know what you mean by ‘main dependencies’.

Training for each site was scheduled over 3-4 weeks, then trainers stayed for a 3 week Live Support period.

We did not have any unanticipated issues.

Trainers did assist with some UAT.

We didn’t have SAP Prod Pak.

I set up 4 overarching principles with the trainers: 1) every sales person MUST be able to enter an order into the System on Day 1 2) every inventory person MUST be able to order material 3) every warehouse person MUST be able to recepit goods which have been ordered and 4) every warehouse person MUST be able to get a truck out with the right paperwork.

Let me know if you want to talk further (eg. via Skype)

— Robert Watson, Australia
User deleted says:

March 14, 2011 at 1:29 pm

SAP training

Steven

Here are some comments out of my experience training +/- 4800 users over a 2 year period

At which point in the project did you begin scoping out the training? We started scoping a year before as lot of focus was on computer literacy and associated skills. We also focused on the various training courses in order to anticipate and plan for the magnitude of training to be presented before a go-live.

What were your main dependencies?· Initial computer literacy and SAP Navigation as well as business process training and exposure. Critical is that ALL training material be completed by final UAT in order for training staff to verifiy correctness. If things change and they will, it is minor changes and manageable. Otherwise training could be delayed or train with wrong material which is not godd for credibility.


What were the timelines for your delivery? ·This was based on number of users, number of courses and duration as every site were different. The computer litercay was done way upfront, followed by SAP Navigation 1-2 months before actual SAP training and then the SAP functional training. Also based on target population ability the lower level staff were trained closer to go-live with SAP Navigation & functional training


What factors affected training that you did not anticipate?·Slowness of learners in grasping new technology and understanding business processes. System freeze is critical otherwise changes occur during training.


Did your UAT overlap with material design? If so, how did you manage this and what was the impact?· Definitely – had dedicated staff looking after correctness of material, not the project team member.


We have access to the SAP Productivity Pak, what are your experiences of this? None.

We applied some NLP techniques towards the last sites training and reduced training time dramatically. Like to share that in more detail should you need more info.

We used staff in the specific areas as trainers and project team members only where small number of learners we present.

Dawie
User deleted says:

March 14, 2011 at 5:09 pm

Make it process driven

The points raised here are useful for any large software roll out.

I like the approach Robert used to set some highlevel objectives. This will really help to ensure you are on the right track. Can a sales person enter an order? Simple but very powerful.

The effects of computer literacy can not be underestimated as Dawie describes and the earlier you tackle this the better.

The organization I work for has a people-centric business process application. The process modelling can be done at any point in the project but is best done up front. Identify current business processes and build requirements for the new system. This is then used by the implementation team to customise and configure the system.

The processes are created using a very simple notation that can easily be understood by the business users. So the same documentation that is used for the technical part can also be used for training. The application has a capability called Storyboards that allow you to build role based walk throughs of the process. At each step in the walk through it also includes links to the SAP transactions so the user can launch directly into it while following the process.

Test scripts are also attached to the process steps so that the live process is used for UAT too.

This means that a single process model is created and managed centrally that is used for configuration, UAT, training and ongoing user support. The single model means any changes to the system are immediately reflected across all the colateral.

I think this used in conjunction with a broader training strategy would be very effective. I’m happy to discuss further.

Thanks

Craig