state-of-the-art training and education for sap users: sap learning hub user adoption edition

Enterprise Applications Consultingwww.eaconsult.com • 510.540.8655

Joshua Greenbaum

Enterprise Applications Consulting

Summer 2015

State-of-the-Art Training

and Education for SAP Users:

SAP Learning Hub User Adoption Edition

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Quest for Innovation and the Need for Training ......................................................... 1

Innovation, Process Improvement, and the Training Gap ......................................................................... 2

Emerging Best Practices in Training: SAP’s Innovative Approach .............................................................. 7

SAP’s Approach: SAP Learning Hub User Adoption Edition ....................................................................... 9

SAP Learning Hub User Adoption Edition: First Look ............................................................................... 13

Conclusion: Changing Perceptions about Enterprise Training ................................................................. 16


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Introduction: The Quest for Innovation and the Need for Training

Meeting the challenge of competitiveness in the global economy is an increasingly important focus of senior management in enterprises across the globe. The initiatives to drive innovation in business processes are spawning an increasing investment in technologies that can be used to create new processes and improve existing ones. Each of these initiatives has as its goal the overall improvement of corporate functionality across a broad range of key performance indicators.

However, both technology providers and their customers have historically failed to pay sufficient attention to a key ingredient for success. This failure threatens to compromise the ability of companies of all sizes, geographies, and industries to readily make use of their new business processes and technologies.

The missing ingredient is continuous education and training, particularly for an end user population that is faced with a dynamically changing business and technology environment. Indeed, a growing gap between gains in technology and business innovation, and the quality and quantity of training available

to the intended users of these new capabilities, threatens to inhibit their uptake, and unnecessarily increase their total cost of ownership. While technology and business innovation are moving forward rapidly, training and education technology has for the most part not enjoyed a similar uptake in innovation, and providing a fundamentally inadequate level of training and education for many user populations – including end users and management in particular – has continued to be the norm in the majority of organizations.

This gap means that strategic investments in innovation are potentially at risk. Poor or incomplete training is a key factor in the majority of problems related to the implementation and use of enterprise software, problems that will only get worse as more new technology is deployed and individual employees

are asked to use the new functionality to take greater responsibility for overall enterprise success. Analysis by Enterprise Applications Consulting of dozens of implementation failures has shown that a lack of training and education is a major factor in a large majority of the cases.

Over the last two years, SAP has brought to market an increasingly comprehensive, cloud-‐based set of training and education tools and services that have helped eliminate this gap and make it easier and more cost-‐effective to deploy state-‐of-‐the-‐art training materials to its customers and partners. The latest effort by SAP augments its cloud-‐based training delivery and management platform with specific content and services intended for end users.

This new offering, the SAP Learning Hub User Adoption Edition, complements the existing SAP Learning Hub suite, with an extensive library of user-‐specific content, providing a wide range of on-‐line learning

A growing gap between gains in technology and business innovation, and the quality and quantity of training available to the intended users of these new capabilities, threatens to inhibit their uptake and unnecessarily increase their total cost of ownership.


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experiences. End users can access topic-‐specific Learning Rooms where a variety of structured content, videos, and e-‐book-‐based instruction are available. The Learning Rooms also include peer-‐based collaborative and social learning, as well as access to expert-‐led content. Perhaps most important of all, SAP Learning Hub User Adoption Edition offers user organizations the ability to easily develop their own training content, and deploy it in the SAP Learning Hub. End-‐user developed training can also be made accessible from within an actual SAP system, i.e. as in-‐application guidance, while it is in use.

With the rollout of the User Adoption Edition, SAP asked Enterprise Applications Consulting to update its 2014 review of the initial SAP Learning Hub offering, which includes access to SAP Workforce Performance Builder functionality, online Learning Rooms for Social Learning, and hands-‐on practice provided through SAP Live Access. This report was written just after the release of the SAP Learning Hub User Adoption Edition, which meant it wasn’t possible to interview early customers. Nonetheless, as the main platform and technologies in SAP Learning Hub User Adoption Edition were available in the initial release of SAP Learning Hub editions focusing on project teams, i.e. SAP professionals, it’s clear that Learning Hub User Adoption Edition is well-‐positioned to provide the same high level learning experience to users as the enterprise, customer, and partner editions have been able to provide to SAP professionals working for SAP customers and partners. With the SAP Learning Hub subscriber base growing in triple digits, EAC is confident that SAP’s user community will see a similar or even greater value with the SAP Learning Hub End User Adoption Edition than subscribers saw in the SAP Learning Hub editions targeting SAP professionals.

Innovation, Process Improvement, and the Training Gap

There is little doubt that enterprises of all sizes and in all geographies have significantly increased their expenditures in new technology and business processes in the last decade. This is particularly true in the SAP market, where new offerings such as SAP S/4HANA, as well as acquisitions such as Ariba, Concur, Fieldglass, hybris, and SuccessFactors, have accelerated technology acquisition in support of the development of new business processes and the renewal of outdated ones.

This activity in the SAP market serves as an excellent proxy for the global market as a whole: the rush to innovate is truly a global phenomenon, and technology is leading the way. Importantly, innovation is seen not as a nice-‐to-‐have aspect of global business, but as an essential component in a wide range of enterprise goals and aspirations.

A recent survey by consultancy PwC of over 1,300 CEOs across 68 countries illustrates the relative and growing importance of innovation as a key driver of success. PwC’s results echo the sentiment of observers across the global economy: while there continue to be myriad strategies for success, innovation in products and services form a dominant theme among CEOs surveyed. (See Figure 1.)


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Figure 1: Importance of Innovation

Source: PwC 17th Annual Global CEO Survey, 2014

Behind these key factors is a set of important changes to the global economy and its workforce that make achieving these levels of innovation more problematic than ever before. The need to more closely manage and deploy talent is running headfirst into the need to support a more geographically, educationally, and socially diverse workforce. This workforce needs not just more skills than ever before, but it must also be able to adapt quickly and effectively to changes in the work environment that require new skills and an understanding of new processes. This is required both of full-‐time employees as well as an increasingly important contingent workforce. In addition, these requirements are growing in the face of a generational shift in workforces across the industrial world. As younger millennial employees begin to dominate the workforce, the requirement for providing training based on their culture of instant access and mobility is only growing in importance.


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The irony of the nearly unanimous recognition that innovation is important is that it coincides with a lack of appreciation for the requirement of training in the quest for innovation. Surveys, such the PwC study cited above, highlight this lack of recognition. When executives are asked about what systems, tools, or processes are needed for fostering innovation, training is conspicuous in its absence. Research done by a broad spectrum of IT analyst firms also echoes this essential problem: technology and business training is among the lowest of priorities in the enterprise, with most software training taking place only at the time of implementation. Systematic re-‐training, new hire training, and training for upgrades and new technologies all share the same lack of priority and budget.

The irony of this lack of recognition ceases to be a benign artifact of corporate neglect when looking at the impact of training – or lack thereof – on enterprise effectiveness. This is particularly true in enterprise software, on which enterprises are increasingly dependent for their innovation strategies.

A look at two basic measures of innovation success – ERP and IT project success – highlights the role that training plays in overall enterprise success. Analyst firm IDC’s survey of IT managers yielded an almost perfect correlation between overall team skills and ERP success (as shown in Figure 2). This somewhat obvious conclusion is rendered more telling when looking at the specific role of training (as shown in Figure 3).

The Intersection of Talent, Training, and the New Global Economy

Modern training technology and methods need to account for:

• Geographic, educational, and social diversity in the workforce.

• Contingent and just-‐in-‐time workforce deployments.

• Rapid changes in technology and business process that require new skills.

• Increased competition for skilled talent.


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Figure 2: Relationship between team skill and overall ERP project success.

Source: IDC, Training Impact on Projects Survey, 2011

Assuming the difference between IT project success and ERP-‐related project success is largely one of nomenclature, the linear correlation between the number of hours of training and overall IT project success is also significant. More significant, according to the IDC data, is the relatively small increase in training that is needed to have a big impact in project success. An average of 25 hours in total training for a given skill or capability correlates with a project success rate of 10 percent. The addition of 15 hours of training, however, brings that success rate to 100 percent.

While these differences are averages based on the impressions of IT managers, and are not from a systematic study of the factors that go into a given project’s success, it’s clear that IDC’s data show a powerful correlation between training and project success that extends the value of training all the way up the food chain, to the aspirations highlighted in the Harris Interactive survey.

Figure 3: Relationship between number of hours of training and IT project success.

Source: IDC, Training Impact on Projects Survey, 2011


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So why is training ignored or neglected in the quest for project, innovation, and overall enterprise success? Why, as IDC has amply shown in Figure 4, below, is the notion of training clearly under-‐supported and unappreciated across the enterprise landscape?

Figure 4: Biggest SAP Training Challenges Faced

Source: IDC, 2013, and Michael Management’s 2013 SAP Training Survey

To be fair, while it’s the customers who aren’t prioritizing training, it’s the vendors who bear most of the responsibility for the poor state of the practice in enterprise software training. The basic problem is simple – training has traditionally been based on a 20th century classroom model that is expensive, time consuming, and fundamentally inadequate for training users in the real-‐world application of a given technology in the company’s specific business environment. Classroom training typically is measured in hours and often in days, which means that overload is common, retention is limited, and the training is based on generic materials produced in a one-‐size-‐fits-‐all manner. All this guarantees that the training will be incomplete, irrelevant, or both. Furthermore, training takes place based on the trainers’ schedule, not on the timeliness of the need by users or their companies. The result is that training offered by the traditional classroom model is considered of limited value at best.

To add insult to injury, most classroom training isn’t just ineffective; it’s costly as well. Customers looking to send their employees to software training must take them out of action for days at a time, adding enormous opportunity costs to the cost of the training itself. Travel and related expenses also add to the lack of cost-‐effectiveness, and travel time adds additional opportunity cost.

The result is that many companies, the majority of SAP customers included, have struggled to find a measurable return on investment for their training. The theory behind the ROI benefits of good training is well-‐established – a study from 2001 showed that the ROI benefits can range anywhere from 30


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percent to 7,000 percent1. While no study has emerged to challenge those results, the reality is that it’s easy to see that enormous waste is more the norm than is any measurable return on investment.

In the face of this lack of demonstrable ROI, vendors and their implementation partners have downplayed the importance of training, and in most cases largely failed to either improve training methods and technologies, or do a better job of justifying training on the basis of its ROI. Customers have followed this neglect with equal degrees of indifference, and the result is that training in the enterprise software market is lagging well behind the theoretical ability of training to meet clearly established priorities for enterprise innovation.

Emerging Best Practices in Training: SAP’s Innovative Approach

While the world of enterprise software training has lagged behind its theoretical potential, significant improvements in both technology and methodology have positioned training for a major overhaul in its capabilities, perception, and ROI. SAP’s work in this regard has been significant, and the company’s investments and emerging education and training strategy have largely mirrored the best practices that have been accumulating in the last ten years.

The current state of the art in training has six major components that effectively define a way to move beyond the limits of the older models and provide an important path towards a significant ROI for companies that invest in these new technologies and methods.

Continuous, real-‐time, and at the point of need. Training needs to be available when and where it’s needed, not when convenient for a trainer or a training facility. This means that training must be available both when an employee is first exposed to a new process or technology, as well as at any subsequent time that an employee needs his or her knowledge refreshed. This is a key ingredient for ensuring that training is both available when it’s needed and can be delivered in a cost-‐effective manner.

Self-‐directed and right-‐sized. Training has to be accessible to the employee at his or her initiative, according to the perceived need. This accessibility must be managed so that valuable time isn’t wasted on the wrong training. Similarly, older training models that were based on multiple hours or even days in the classroom must be replaced by training that is available in more “digestible” portions – typically an hour or so at a time. This requirement helps ensure that on-‐demand training can be consumed in the ad hoc manner that is required by the modern workplace. It also solidly aligns corporate training with the needs of younger “millennial” workers who are unwilling to train using older classroom models.

On-‐demand and cloud-‐based. Making training available in an on-‐demand basis is imperative if training is to meet the first two criteria. This means that training must live either in a public or private cloud environment where it is available for use as well as for upgrades and improvements, on a 24/7 basis. On-‐demand, cloud-‐based training allows companies to do away with the scheduling and opportunity

1 Return on Investment in Training, Myths and Realities No. 16. Bettina Lankard Brown, ERIC Clearinghouse on Adult, Career, and Vocational Training, 2001.


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costs associated with classroom training, while supporting the rapidly changing demands of the enterprise and its users.

Multi-‐mode. The challenges with the traditional classroom model come from both the inherent limits of this model, as well as the limits presented by using a single, often inflexible model to cover a diverse set of training requirements. Rather than a single model or method, modern training must support multi-‐mode delivery: Interactive and passive training, expert and peer training, social training, multi-‐media and handbook training, and experiential hands-‐on training should be available as needed to meet the specific needs of the employee and the company. This requirement recognizes that the complex mix of content and the diversity of the trainees ensure that one-‐size-‐fits-‐all training models will fail. Training must be made to fit the knowledge to be learned and the person who needs to learn it.

Company-‐specific, non-‐generic training. The ability to train employees on the software system they are expected to use is the gold-‐standard for training that all companies – and their vendors – should aspire to. This is particularly important in the SAP market, where customer and industry-‐specific capabilities limit the usefulness of one-‐size-‐fits-‐all training. Making sure employees are familiar with the systems they are actually using is an important best practice for the 21st century. One of the frustrations with – and critical failure points of – traditional classroom training, was its largely generic nature. Trainees would learn on a system that looked and acted completely different than the one that they would have to use back in the office. Closing this disparity with the tools and services needed to allow user organizations to create the training content they need is an important part of ensuring the relevance and cost-‐effectiveness of training.

Social and collaborative. The ability of users to both seek and provide peer assistance, as well as be recognized by their peers and supervisors for their expertise, is an important new best practice that will go a long way towards embedding training into corporate culture. Peer assistance and recognition are not only good ways to leverage training and expertise, but they also foster a culture of collaboration that can have benefits outside the training environment. This helps embed training, and provide a context for its value and the value of collaboration.

Well-‐managed. Training must not take place in a vacuum – it must be managed as an important component in process excellence and innovation adoption, as well as in talent management, or its true value to the enterprise and its employees will be lost. This means that a modern learning management system needs either to be in place inside the enterprise, or made available as part of the new learning environment.


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As we shall see in the next section, SAP Education’s new approach to training has taken into account all of these new requirements, and, while SAP Learning Hub is still relatively new, its foundation in these principles augurs well for its future success.

SAP’s Learning Hub User Adoption Edition

SAP Learning Hub User Adoption Edition is the latest in SAP’s continuing efforts to completely revamp how training and education for SAP customers and partners are developed and delivered. This initiative, which started with the original cloud-‐based SAP Learning Hub editions for SAP professionals in 2014, is designed to be a direct response to the historical end user training gap that exists across the enterprise software market. In its initial efforts, SAP brought to bear recently acquired technology and new functionality that it had deployed in a new on-‐demand, cloud-‐based platform – the SAP Learning Hub. This platform continues to provide the basis for the content delivery, social learning, peer and SAP expert collaboration, as well as hands-‐on practice on SAP live systems that forms the basis of the Learning Hub User Adoption Edition.

At the core of SAP Learning Hub End User Adoption Edition are over 3,000 training content assets. Among these assets are simulations, presentations, interactive training, handbooks, and classroom training content that has been repurposed for e-‐learning. The assets can be consumed individually or within a topic-‐specific online Learning Room, where collaborative and peer-‐led training can also take place.

The goals of SAP Learning Hub User Adoption Edition and its associated tools and technologies span six major domains, and largely align with the state-‐of-‐the-‐art in enterprise software training:

• Provide a state-‐of-‐the art environment for the on-‐demand delivery of training content.

• Provide an on-‐line catalogue and store for discovering and purchasing training content.

The State of Art in Training Technology and Methodology

• Continuous, real-‐time • Self-‐directed • Multi-‐mode • Social and collaborative • On-‐demand and Cloud-‐based • Company-‐specific and company created • Well-‐managed


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• Support multiple training methods, including interactive, e-‐learning, presentations, scheduled virtual classroom training, live transaction simulations using SAP systems, and ad-‐hoc expert-‐led group training, among others.

• Provide a social collaboration environment – based on SAP Jam – that supports social learning, peer interaction, assistance, and collaboration around training and knowledge acquisition.

• Provide a training management environment – based on SuccessFactors Learning Management – that can be used as a learning management system (LMS), or be used in conjunction with an existing LMS.

• Provide access to content creation and development tools for building and deploying next-‐generation training content.

These goals, already admirably demonstrated in SAP Learning Hub Editions for SAP professionals, have been furthered in SAP Learning Hub End User Adoption Edition, setting SAP on a path to be a market-‐leader in training content development, delivery, and management.

Below is an overview of the principal components of the SAP Learning Hub User Adoption Edition offering.

SAP Learning Hub User Adoption Edition Overview

SAP Learning Hub User Adoption Edition is the focus of SAP’s burgeoning end-‐user training efforts, providing a one-‐stop shopping and deployment experience for all of SAP Education’s training content. This portal allows a learner to search the training catalogue, find the appropriate training, sign up for courses, understand the requirement and pre-‐requisites for a course, build and maintain a curriculum, and immediately take classes that are offered on demand. Content searches can be filtered by business process, user role, or content delivery type. The use of SAP Jam in SAP Learning Hub allows access to SAP instructors and subject matter experts, discussion forums, peers, and additional content in a collaborative and social environment. By providing SCORM capability for use by third party learning management systems, as well as SuccessFactors LMS, SAP Learning Hub User Adoption Edition is also able to support training management, learning objectives, and individual training goals according to specific company goals and requirements.

SAP Learning Hub User Adoption Edition provides a private, cloud-‐based platform for comprehensive learning management in a single solution. It offers dynamic learning and enablement tools, such as:

• In-‐application guidance for on-‐the-‐job support in real time.

• Use of public SAP-‐led and private social learning rooms, moderated by the customer.

• Access to robust tools and services for content customization.

• Intuitive, self-‐service reporting tools for evaluating learning initiatives.

• Unlimited access to large volumes of standard learning content in multiple languages.

SAP Learning Hub also provides access to SAP certification training and testing for users looking to acquire formal credentials.


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SAP Workforce Performance Builder Overview

The core of the interactive e-‐learning that represents the pinnacle of SAP’s offering is based on an SAP Workforce Performance Builder, which was acquired from datango in 2012. SAP Learning Hub User Adoption Edition includes a new, cloud-‐based SAP Workforce Performance Builder that significantly improves on the original version’s ability to capture a live interactive session of an enterprise software process, and use the captured interaction as a template for creating numerous content types, such as process and training documentation and e-‐learning simulations, among others.

SAP Workforce Performance Builder can be used to capture not just the screen interactions, but also the metadata behind the screen, providing the foundation for building content that can be delivered in the form of in-‐application guidance. SAP Workforce Performance Builder can be used by professional training content developers or end-‐users to develop custom interactive e-‐learning that can be deployed internally, or externally.

SAP Workforce Performance Builder provides two tools in SAP Learning Hub User Adoption Edition for building interactive training, in-‐application guidance, documentation, and other features from a live system, depending on the skills of the user:

Producer

Producer is a full-‐blown content creation and editing tool, intended for use by professional content creators and trainers. Producer records the user interaction with a given application and captures the underlying logic of the application while allowing the content developer to add additional instructions, comments, and other content overlays. With Producer, a professional content creator can record, edit, and enhance training content, producing professional quality training asset content. Producer can also be used to create content that is not specific to IT skills, but can support non-‐IT skill acquisition as well, using quizzes and other content. Producer also supports automated localization and content updates to support the more real-‐time nature of cloud-‐based systems and their update schedules.

Instant Producer

Instant Producer is a lighter-‐weight, wizard-‐based tool intended for use by users of all levels who want to quickly capture screen interactions and use them to produce training content. (See Figure 5, below.) While not as feature-‐rich as Producer, Instant Producer has the same ability to capture the underlying logic of the application being recorded, and add comments and other annotations for learners, users, and professional authors.


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Figure 5: Instant Producer

Source: SAP

Both Producer and Instant Producer can be used to develop training on non-‐SAP systems – any application can be captured in either tool and edited using a WYSIWYG editor. This is an important feature that EAC believes will help SAP customers extend the value of all their training content and provide SAP Learning Hub with a unique position as a general-‐purpose tool for next-‐generation training and education.

SAP is also offering a set of third party services, called Content Factory Services, that allow end-‐user organizations to create basic learning content using Instant Producer and then send the raw content to an SAP partner. The partner can then edit it for quality, add a voice-‐over, and when it’s finished, upload a professional-‐quality finished product to the customer’s SAP Learning Hub.

Workforce Performance Builder functionality in SAP Learning Hub User Adoption Edition can be used to develop a variety of different training outputs, depending on the particular training requirement:

• Navigator-‐based in-‐context help and training. The Navigator provides in-‐context help and training inside an actual application. Navigator uses the Desktop Assistant in Workforce Performance Builder to create training information that is displayed on the user’s desktop as he or she uses the actual application.

• Simulation. This output mode uses Producer to create simulations that can be used to demonstrate the flow of a specific process. Simulations can either be fully self-‐running, in what is called “demo mode,” or they can be interactive and under the control of the user, in “practice” or “test” modes.


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• Documentation. Producer can capture screens, and then output a variety of different documentation types, such as standard training materials, test sheets, hands-‐on guides, and others.

• PowerPoint Presentations. Producer can import presentation documents and then edit them, add audio to them, and otherwise enhance existing presentations.

• Books and e-‐books. Producer can also be used to create and edit books and e-‐books.

Behind the scenes, the Workforce Performance Builder Manager manages the distribution and use of the training content. This includes assigning content, on-‐boarding new users, building content hierarchies, setting up courses, and other functions that support the development, delivery, and use of training content, as well as analytics on learner progress and learning gaps.

Learning Rooms

Learning rooms, a core feature of SAP Learning Hub, has been augmented for the Learning Hub User Adoption Edition by a total over 10 Learning Rooms, covering a wide range of SAP products and services. The Learning Rooms leverage SAP Jam to provide virtual collaboration rooms for the exchange of ideas and content between trainees, their peers, SAP instructors, and SAP subject matter experts. The purpose is to provide a social learning environment that can help individuals better grasp new and complex capabilities and share experiences and concepts.

SAP Learning Hub User Adoption Edition: First Look

In addition to its original review of SAP Learning Hub and SAP Education’s strategy, EAC also looked at the assets available in the Learning Hub User Adoption Edition. EAC’s overall impression is that the addition of the Learning Hub User Adoption Edition showcases SAP’s continued commitment to staking

a leadership position in training and education, in particular for end-‐user enablement. Most importantly, SAP Learning Hub User Adoption Edition provides additional proof that SAP Learning Hub provides a training experience that is truly unique. Judging by the rapid uptake of the SAP Learning Hub, SAP can expect Learning Hub User Adoption Edition to help revitalize an end-‐user training market that has become jaded by the low quality of training and education in the past.

SAP Learning Hub User Adoption Edition provides a comprehensive, easy-‐to-‐navigate view of SAP’s training assets.

A trainee can navigate through the catalogue and search for training content by subject, content type, business process, and other criteria, and then drill into an overview of the content that includes course outline, course goals, duration, pre-‐requisites, content type and other information (see Figure 5). The trainee then adds the selected training to a personalized curriculum stored in My Active Courses, and as

SAP Education’s biggest challenge is to get customers who have become jaded by the previous state-‐of-‐the-‐art to understand just how different training can be.


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most of the courseware in SAP Learning Hub is available on-‐demand, a trainee can then begin a training session.

In addition to the pre-‐existing content built using SAP Workforce Performance Builder, SAP Learning Hub User Adoption Edition allows user-‐developed content made with Workforce Performance Builder to be available in the user’s Active Courses. The personalization and customization of end-‐user training available via the SAP Workforce Performance promise to significantly improve the value and relevancy of SAP end-‐user training.

Figure 6: SAP Learning Hub Views – SUBJECT-‐SPECIFIC CURRICULUM VIEW


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Figure 7: SAP Learning Hub Views – INDIVIDUAL COURSE VIEW

Source: SAP

The availability of new content from SAP Workforce Performance Builder is also helping SAP to upgrade and/or sunset some of the older content. While SAP still has some way to go before all the content in SAP Learning Hub has been fully modernized, EAC expects that the combination of new end-‐user and partner developed content, and net-‐new SAP content, will ensure that modern, up-‐to-‐date, and highly relevant training content will soon be the dominant form of content in the Learning Hub User Adoption Edition.

As part of its review of SAP Learning Hub User Adoption Edition, EAC was able to test the access to SAP Workforce Performance Builder Instant Producer. The tool was exceptionally easy to use, and, importantly, could be used for capturing on-‐screen functionality in any application with virtually no training. It was easy to see from this test that SAP Workforce Performance Builder and Instant Producer would be able to support a broad build-‐up of end-‐user training, developed in-‐house, by any customer. This ability to create training specific to an individual customer’s environment – including non-‐SAP applications and functions – promises to democratize enterprise software end-‐user education and training in significant ways.


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Conclusion: Changing Perceptions about User Training

SAP Learning Hub User Adoption Edition represents an opportunity for SAP to alter the way in which innovation adoption is consumed and managed in the enterprise software market. Making training and education as accessible, useful, relevant, and as effective as possible makes the business and technology innovation made possible by SAP similarly more accessible, useful, relevant, and effective. Moreover, the historical difficulty in establishing an ROI for training will disappear as the comprehensive, continuous, company-‐specific training that SAP Learning Hub User Adoption Edition is designed to deliver becomes more ubiquitous in the enterprise. This is precisely the platform and the methodology needed to make the theoretical ROI of well-‐designed training a reality.

SAP’s progress in building out not only the capabilities of SAP Learning Hub and SAP Workforce Performance Builder, but also the out-‐of-‐the-‐box content it provides, shows how serious SAP is about revolutionizing training and education. The fact that the SAP Education is now an important part of SAP’s One Service offering, which is designed to provide customers with a single point of contact and access for the tools and services needed to support the full lifecycle of SAP’s products, shows how serious SAP is about significantly upgrading the importance of training and education for its customers.

The new status of SAP Education and the improvements that are showcased in SAP Learning Hub User Adoption Edition will go a long way towards helping SAP change stagnant corporate mindsets about the value of training, and help promote the value-‐add that comprehensive, life-‐cycle training represents. That change itself is not a foregone conclusion. Much hard labor remains before the majority of customers see the light. Nonetheless, as the use of SAP Learning Hub User Adoption Edition grows, the ability of SAP to present a strong case for the ROI of training will become significantly easier. The die has been cast, and the support of SAP’s senior management for the new training and education offerings ensures that these new capabilities will get the audience they deserve in the SAP customer base.

The good news for SAP is that SAP Learning Hub User Adoption Edition represents precisely the paradigm shift needed in the delivery of training and education that can push the market forward in this essential way. The change in perception will take time, but with Learning Hub User Adoption Edition, the chances for SAP and the market to succeed are now in place.

state-of-the-art training and education for sap users: sap learning hub user adoption edition

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