All the advantages that SAP S/4HANA brings are geared toward a significantly higher degree of standardization and don’t support the level of customization that R/3 users are accustomed to. This means users need to adapt to the application, which can pose challenges when aiming for a high level of user adoption. If companies want to harvest these benefits resulting from SAP S/4HANA, they will need to take change management seriously across all 5 Moments of NeedTM (a concept developed by learning evangelist Bob Mosher). The 5 Moments of Need are:
Learning for the first time
Employees will need to learn new processes and adapt to the new SAP S/4HANA user interface and why the change has been initiated.
Expanding knowledge base
Employees need to fully grasp the new working methods and the desired outcomes, understand the principles of redesigned processes and learn to use the analytical capabilities.
Remembering and applying learned concepts
Once the solution has gone live, support is needed for more than just base cases. Employees should have access to materials that help in their actual working context, which is defined by their role and the current application, process and task.
When things don’t go according to plan
In today’s working environment, the exception is the rule. You want your team to react quickly and appropriately without taking up their colleagues’ time with meetings or calls. That’s why employee self-service for content access is imperative, and why even more content should be created and managed by in-house subject matter experts (SMEs).
When change occurs
Agility is one of the great plus points of SAP S/4HANA. Improvements can be implemented and rolled out in a much more dynamic way and the time it takes to transform identified needs (data) into process and resource modifications can be considerably shortened. This is another area where the demand for efficient SME content creation comes into play in combination with push notifications and real-time availability for new content.