Drive SAP HCM Adoption Learn How to Make HR Self-services Easy-to-use, Intuitive, and Accessible Anywhere. Brought to you by
What if you had 100 employees that needed to access your SAP ERP system one day a year? Or 10,000? For many HR organizations that s the challenge they face providing casual users of their SAP platform direct access to the powerful HR systems to streamline some of the most common business processes in any organization. On top of that, the way people are using the system is changing fast. While most organizations don t allow mobile access to HR systems, research shows that users expect it and are significantly more productive when their solutions are mobilized. Engaging employees through technology is a unique challenge for HR administrators and HR systems because their internal customers range across the entire employee base, so their comfort level with technology also ranges dramatically. Asking a business analyst to submit a leave request using the ERP system is very different than asking a delivery person to perform the same task. Secondly, by nature of the processes involved, many HR systems users are infrequent or casual users, meaning they only access the systems occasionally to perform specific tasks, so even if they are trained, their familiarity with the technology and interface goes stale. According to a recent survey from the Corporate Executive Board s HR Leadership Council 1, the top priority for HR executives is engaging employees, but implementing HR IT systems is the most difficult priority on the list. The challenge of user adoption and engagement hits the HR organization directly and the broader organizational impact can be greater than many C-level executives may expect. 1 2014 HR Priorities at Midsized Companies, Corporate Executive Board (2013). 01
The Risk of Doing Nothing It s no secret that in the push to profitability, HR IT projects can sometimes be overlooked or pushed down the priority list by the C-suite. If an organization with low user adoption chooses not to address the issue of engaging its employees through more user-friendly HR systems, there are several likely outcomes. Perhaps most immediately, the return on investment for the HR systems declines dramatically when very few users actually adopt the system or access it infrequently. The goal of an SAP ERP system is to provide users with access to information and data they need. So if they cannot access that data, they either won t use it or ask someone else to access it for them. Neither is positive for productivity or adoption. Another likely outcome of ignoring this issue is that during periods of high demand (open enrollment, for example) the HR and IT staff will be inundated with requests from users on how to access the system or perform the tasks on behalf of the users. If a user hasn t accessed the system in the past year, but has to perform an important task by a certain date, the level of help desk request calls will likely skyrocket. That, again, cuts into the ROI for the system and impacts organizational productivity and employee engagement as well. According to a CFO.com 2 survey, the average cost for your HR staff to manually enroll an employee in benefits is $109.48; the average cost for an employee to enroll online via self-service is $21.79. That s an 80% savings. And there s also the unintended outcome of frustrated employees. If it takes a manager several hours and multiple help desk sessions to access the files for the employees they manage, they are likely going to become frustrated and avoid accessing the system in the future, opting to have someone in the HR organization access it on their behalf. Envision, instead, that manager having simplified access to the employees information and perhaps even a method of connecting with other managers or employees within that system. Not only will this make managers more efficient, more responsive to employee needs, but it further engages employees by making their work better. Managers are employees, too, and streamlining their administrative duties leaves them more time to focus on developing their people and their own capabilities as managers. And those priorities of developing managers and engaging employees rank very high (fifth and first, respectively) in the Corporate Executive Board survey of priorities for HR executives. 10% 25% Mobile HR by the Numbers Source: Towers Watson HR Service Delivery and Technology Survey Exective Summary Report 2013 > 25% > 50% + 37mins companies currently providing mobile HR access Source: BYOD: A Global Perspective, Cisco companies that plan to implement mobile HR access within the next 12 to 18 months increase in employee adoption when HR processes are mobilized increase in manager adoption when HR processes are mobilized Source: CedarCrestone 2013 2014 HR Systems Survey, 16th Annual Edition > 13% employees gain per week on average in using BYOD year over year increase in manager productivity seen by organizations using HCM mobility tools Source: Aberdeen Group, Mobile HCM: Workforce and Talent Management on the Move 2 Precious Resources, CFO.com, (June 16, 2003). 02
The Front-End Conundrum Let s face it unless your expertise is in developing content for technical training, most IT is complicated on the back-end. It s simply one of the realities of creating more powerful technology. Whether it s an ERP system on top of a database or an app on a smartphone, what s going on behind the scenes is often more than the average user can fully understand. Where the complexity can be simplified for the user is on the front-end the user interface. Consider the difference between the average smartphone and the average ERP system. Smartphones, from their inception, were designed for a wide variety of users across the general population and have a very limited amount of real estate to surface functionality. So their interface has to be direct and intuitive. In addition to the interface, the whole back-end process is important. If you purchase a movie or an album, Today, when a company invests heavily in a new enterprise-wide IT platform, the expectation is that users across the enterprise will be able to leverage it. And even more, the new paradigm for creating a compelling enterprise wide IT platform is to start with the user experience. you don t care about the billing system or the complex back-end processes. Everything from selection to order needs to be thought through from the user perspective. If there s one takeaway from the mobilization boom, it s that the right interface intertwined with smart processes can make some of the most complicated technology seem simple. Most ERP technology, on the other hand, was developed with expert users as its intended audience and powerful back-end functionality was the first goal. For many years, ERP systems like SAP lacked that streamlined interface because it wasn t deemed necessary for its more expert users. As more areas of the enterprise began leveraging the ERP system notably HR and its internal customers the need for a simplified interface has been growing. Today, when a company invests heavily in a new enterprise-wide IT platform, the expectation is that users across the enterprise will be able to leverage it. And even more, the new paradigm for creating a compelling enterprise wide IT platform is to start with the user experience. So what are the options for a new interface on an existing ERP system? For a long time, the only option was developing a custom-built interface. But given the complexity of the average ERP system on the back-end, customization projects quickly developed a reputation for spiraling out of scope rapidly and becoming extremely expensive. In many cases, it wasn t developing the interface itself, but rather connecting it to the ERP system where things got complicated and expensive. The next generation of streamlined interfaces for ERP systems came in the form of portals, which have gained good tracking in HR. According to a recent survey from Towers Watson, half of the organizations polled use portal technology, primarily to enable employee self-service, but also to ensure compliance, communicate policy and increase collaboration within HR. SAP offers its own portal technology and many large enterprises have used it to surface relevant functionality and content to specific user base, including the HR users. But while the web-based nature of portals provides expanded access to ERP systems, they have drawbacks. For starters, they have grown to be so complicated at many organizations that the benefits they are designed to deliver are offset by the amount of training and maintenance they require. In addition to a high level of configuration, there can be increased set up and support costs that come along with a portal. And to some end-users, it s seen as simply adding another layer into the already complicated access path. It s another system to learn. 3 Your Next Portal Should Be an Engagement Workplace, Forrester Research (February 3, 2013). 03
Signs that your HR System is Not Being Used Effectively High or growing number of help desk requests by users High training costs High support costs Lower adoption rates among target users Surveys of user base indicate dissatisfaction or frustration with system Focus groups/testing indicate users do not fully understand the capabilities of the system According to a recent Forrester Research report 3, Many organizations face an aging and ineffective existing portal infrastructure. Upgrading will require a very different strategy that will not include anything that looks like an existing portal. A mature and once decidedly unsexy technology, portals (or at least the use case for portals) are hot again. These engagement workplaces will combine traditional publishing and employee self-service functionality with enterprise social, document collaboration, and extended transactional capabilities wrapped with pervasive mobile access. Today, many organizations consider customization projects or portal implementations too costly or too involved to provide the streamlined access they seek for casual ERP system users. The Benefits of Familiarity User adoption and engagement can grind to a halt when a new system is rolled out with a completely new interface for users to learn. Even if the actual functionality is not overly complicated, simply rolling out a new look and feel can be enough to intimidate casual IT users that are accessing HR functionality in your SAP environment. The most effective method of expanding user adoption of an enterprise HR system is to deliver an interface that users are familiar with. It requires less training and is less intimidating for the broadest set of casual users. Sitrion, a provider of HR self-service technology, has solved this problem for SAP customers by creating a familiar user interface leveraging the most popular and familiar platforms. Sitrion helps customers simplify work and maximize value for employees and managers by letting them make real-time decisions regarding SAPsupported business processes within the preferred collaborative environment resulting in one place to work to drive adoption and boost productivity. Sitrion has found a way to deliver powerful SAP functionality and solutions, such as SAP employee & manager self-services (ESS/MSS), directly to employees and managers via Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Office 365 (cloud-based), and via mobile devices. The Freedom of Being Empowered Additionally, customers can quickly extend these solutions using an integrated Microsoft Visual Studio development tool to address any SAP business process or decision workflow. Sitrion enables you to better leverage.net developers to create compelling solutions based on SAP. Because Sitrion s front end is either a SharePoint WebPart or fully responsive HTML 5-based design, leveraging an SAP system through it is much simpler, allowing employees to integrate SAP applications into their individual work environments and practices. And like a portal, the customization options for branding and messaging are available so users don t feel like they re logging into a complicated back-end system, but rather simply accessing their departmental site or Intranet. Furthermore with the HTML 5-based, responsive design, customers can enable mobile accessibility across all devices for almost no cost. 04
The benefits of this approach start with increased user adoption of your SAP system and increased employee engagement. Employees feel more engaged within their company because they are not being shut out of the systems they need and aren t constantly putting in requests for IT and HR assistance. Employees and managers alike are also more productive because they are leveraging the self-service functionality the interface delivers to them. Case Study An independent oil and natural gas exploration and production company that uses SAP managed its open enrollment process for many years using a paper-based process. The forms were completed by its more than 7,500 employees and then HR or IT had to input the information manually into the system, which introduced a high frequency of errors. Employees were seeing their benefits show up inaccurately, which decreased employee engagement over time. To streamline the process, the company implemented an SAP employee self-service portal allowing the employees to access the system to input their selections directly. While this reduced the number of errors, it increased the number of help requests to the IT support department dramatically. An employee survey found that employees said that the system was difficult to navigate and during open enrollment more than 6,000 IT tickets were submitted at an estimated cost of $50 per ticket. Employee adoption rates went down, instead of up. The issue became so pervasive that the company actually reverted to its original paper-based process for a period, which only increased employees confusion. When the company met with Sitrion, the vision they agreed upon was a single-click open enrollment process for employees accessible through their existing SharePoint environment where they routinely perform business tasks. Sitrion worked with the company to develop a branded, user-friendly interface that employees could use during open enrollment. The goal was to make it so intuitive it could be consumed by any level of user, including brand new users. The result was a significant uptick in user adoption and a significant decrease in IT requests from 6,000 tickets during the portal-based open enrollment period down to four support tickets when using the SharePoint-based interface. Improving user experience is important as a way to improve user adoption. Higher levels of user adoption enable organizations to achieve stronger value from the solutions for both employees and the organization. Cedar Crestone s 2013-2014 HR Systems Survey Three Keys to an Engaging Interface There are three key aspects to a successful HR systems interface: usability, accessibility, and flexibility. The interface has to be easy to use for a wide variety of users from daily to casual. It has to be accessible from more than just the employee s desktop. And it has to be flexible so it can cater to the changing needs of the organizations it serves. For example, address fields are not the same in all countries. For an organization that has offices in various countries, the interface has to be flexible enough to accommodate the various address configurations. In Sitrion s model, those types of changes are made on the front end in SharePoint, not within the SAP system itself. So the manager of one country can configure their interface differently than another country manager with a major development project happening across the enterprise. It s a more flexible and much more cost-effective environment in which to make changes. Accessibility in today s mobile environment means employees expect to be able to access their systems anywhere, anytime. This rings especially true for HR functionality and processes. Managers approving vacation requests or employees updating their profile status may be taking place outside the company s internal network. The easier that process is made, the more engaged the employees will be with the process. 05
Sitrion empowers customer to extend SAP HR processes and information securely and quickly to employees smartphones and tablets without building out a costly infrastructure. The easiest method of mobilizing is through Sitrion s HTML 5-based responsive interface. This allows the same web pages to display on a wide variety of devices exactly how the organization wants them to display. The other option is leveraging Sitrion ONE, the first end-to-end solution to put workforce productivity on any mobile device. The main differentiator to existing solutions is that customers are able to mash up systems like SAP, Microsoft SharePoint, Salesforce.com, and many more in one single app. Imagine you have to approve dozens of workflows per day, which reside in Microsoft SharePoint (collaborative workflows), SAP (HR workflows), and Salesforce.com (CRM workflows). Until now, managers had to go to three different apps, with three different user interfaces and perform multiple clicks to approve those workflows. With Sitrion ONE managers have a unified task center to approve apps from multiple backend system in one single app. Within the native app, which is available for Android, Windows Phone, and ios you have the freedom to create role-based MicroApps. Simplicity is key to create a true bring your own device (BYOD) strategy to drive adoption and boost productivity. Sitrion ONE frees IT from maintaining dozens of apps on mobile devices and provides IT as well as business owners with an intuitive cloud-based administration tool. Sitrion ONE has a cloud-based management console to set up a company system in minutes. Via drag & drop, IT or business owners can create role-based views of so called MicroApps, which are displayed in the single app. Next Steps To summarize, the most effective way to drive increased adoption of SAP HR technology is surprisingly simple: streamline the user interface so the widest set of employees can access the ERP system. Managers become more effective when they have direct and easy access to information they need to manage their employees. And overall ROI for the ERP project increases. For SAP customers with a dual vendor (SAP and Microsoft) and an on-premise strategy, Sitrion s Microsoft SharePoint solution provides the usability, accessibility, and flexibility to increase user adoption and foster deeper employee engagement. For SAP customers who are considering going to the cloud, either a HTML5 interface or integration into Microsoft Office 365 are the solutions to maximize the productivity by getting daily routines done faster. For SAP customers who are looking for a secure end-to-end mobility solution, leveraging one single app while having the freedom to create role-based MicroApps, Sitrion ONE offers customers secure access to sensitive data, while leveraging cloud-based administration for compelling simplification. Contact us at sales@sitrion.com and 877-SITRION. About Sitrion At Sitrion, we help employees to get their job done better every day. In a complex enterprise world, we enable an engaged workforce to stay connected, make smart decisions and be productive. Leveraging their investments in SAP or SharePoint, millions of users depend on us to drive innovation, discover untapped expertise and simplify business processes. Follow us on Twitter @sitrion and at www.sitrion.com. To find out more about Sitrion s solutions visit www.sitrion.com or tune into a live product demonstration at www.sitrion.com/demos. 2014 06