Supporting Organizations with Global Business Operations using SAP Enable Now

Overview

The modern business environment is changing, and rapidly!  New technologies now support disruptive business models that apply sustained pressure to organizations using traditional models.  These disruptive business models, along with changing customer attitudes, are forcing organizations to reconsider their business operations and go-to-market strategies.  Without change, organizations will likely flounder and ultimately cease to exit.

The level of change being undertaken by some organizations would be complex to manage, even if it impacted only a single business unit, country or culture.  Unfortunately for some organizations, it is not a single part of their business being impacted, but their entire global operations, which spans many countries and languages.  These organizations must change, in record speed, at the lowest possible cost and so must leverage all available information to accelerate their transformations.

SAP Enable Now is a solution that helps organizations to deliver faster and cheaper business change for their global business operations.  It supports the rapid development and distribution of media-rich content, in multiple languages, for SAP and non-SAP systems.  Using SAP Enable Now, organizations can provide their workforce with the knowledge they require, at the time and place that they require it, to allow them to transition from their existing to new work environments.

Eva Zauke, SVP and Global Head of SAP Enterprise Adoption says the following about this topic:

“To keep up with the fast pace of change and need for innovation in today’s business environment, organizations must constantly update their existing business processes, as well as adapt to new ones.

For businesses it is vital to manage this change by building and maintaining the skills of their employees to ensure their continued success and the success of the respective innovations.

The SAP Enable Now solution gives businesses the ability to quickly develop and distribute high-quality learning content in multiple languages when and where employees need it.”

The current business challenge

Globally, organizations are undergoing unprecedented change.  Organizations are being forced to transform their business, operating, and go-to-market models or face uncertain futures.

There are several major reasons that organizations with traditional business models are facing such challenging business environments.  In some instances, technical advances have allowed disruptive business models to place sustained pressure on organizations with traditional business models.  Consider the impact that Uber, and similar organizations, have had on the taxi industry in many countries, or the fate of Blockbuster following the availability of reliable video streaming services.  In industries impacted by disruption, existing businesses have either lost a significant proportion of their customer base, have had to completely restructure their business to survive, or have ceased to exist entirely.

Along with disruptive business models, organizations are also facing huge challenges meeting, let alone exceeding, their customers’ expectations.  These have changed dramatically over the last decade as the availability of technology, which enables them to stay connected 24 hours a day, has impacted their expectations about how and when they do business.  This expectation of being able to engage at any time, from any place, has changed the way organizations must now engage with their customers.  As an example, bricks and mortar retailers are facing sustained pressure to retain and grow their customer base when faced with online competitors, which operate 24 x 7 x 365.  Customers are simply not willing to compromise on service or delay their engagement so organizations must transform their go-to-market business models to support the way that their customers want to engage, or lose those customers.

Ultimately, organizations must be willing to reinvent themselves to continue to be relevant to their customers.  This need to continually change has a significant impact on an organization’s business operations, and the people in managing and carrying out those operations.

Customer expectations are changing, and organizations must change to remain relevant

Transforming to survive

Organizations with global business operations understand that the changing business environment is not specific to a single country or culture.  Change is occurring globally, ongoing change is inevitable, so organizations must learn to deal with that change to survive and prosper.

To remain relevant in a changing business environment, organizations must re-imagine their business, operating and go-to-market models and quickly transform to remain competitive.  Whilst transforming the operations in one location is inevitably challenging, particularly given the size and nature of some of the transformations being undertaken, transforming operations globally is a exponentially more difficult task.

If change is inevitable and organizations must change to remain relevant, many will look to do this as quickly and efficiently as possible.  In many instances, organizations will try to leverage the knowledge assets and learnings available from a business transformation in one location, to accelerate the corresponding transformation in other locations.  Re-use of these assets and learnings can significantly reduce the overall effort and cost to transform their entire global business.

SAP Enable Now is a solution designed to support organizations with global operations that are undergoing change.  Not only does it support organizations to build and sustain capability, essential to adopting new technologies and business models, it also provides the ability to quickly redeploy knowledge assets in multiple languages, at a fraction of the traditional cost.  The remainder of this post outlines how SAP Enable Now can support organizations to deliver faster, more successful business change, at a significantly lower cost.

Organizations with global business operations must leverage the knowledge assets and learnings from one location to transformation others

Delivering better business change

SAP Enable Now is a solution designed to allow organizations to quickly capture and distribute the information necessary to support business change.  It can be used to rapidly create media-rich content to teach a workforce about modified business processes and the technology deployed to support those new processes.  Information can be delivered to the workforce in multiple ways, including embedding it into the new technology so that users can easily access the relevant content, with a few clicks of their mouse, at the time and place of need.

SAP Enable Now provides a significant amount of capability to accelerate the development of the information necessary to support organizations undertaking a global business change.  These capabilities include:

Multi-language capabilities

Using SAP Enable Now, it is possible to rapidly develop and deploy information assets in more than 40 languages.  Not only can content be developed in multiple languages, but it is now possible to also seamlessly translate text developed in one language into other supported languages, automatically.  With the click of a mouse, a group of knowledge assets, developed in one language, can be transmitted to SAP Learning Hub to be translated into multiple other languages.  Within minutes, the translated versions of the knowledge assets are returned to SAP Enable Now.  These knowledge assets can then be published for immediate use by the corresponding business users or undergo a business review before being published.

While a separate license is required for SAP Translation Hub to facilitate this capability, content is translated at a fraction of the cost and time that it traditionally takes to translate content manually.  This not only enables organizations to significantly reduce the cost of transforming their business but also accelerates the change and corresponding business benefits and allows organizations to rapidly respond to ongoing changes.

Text to speech capability

The use of audio in content typically drives higher levels of audience engagement with the content and results in better learning outcomes.  The challenge with adding audio to content has always been the cost and time required to record a substantial amount of audio.  Whilst the introduction of text to speech functionality did result in much faster and cheaper audio development, the initial versions of text to speech functionality resulted in robotic sounding audio, which was not well adopted by the corresponding user audiences.

SAP Enable Now now has an integration to Google Text to Speech.  Google Text to Speech not only provides the capability to generate audio with voices that have the correct pronunciation for each language but the voices sound almost human.  The result of this integration is that it is now possible to instantly generate high-quality audio to enhance learning content.  The use of Google Text to Speech does require a Google Text to Speech account and there is a small cost to generating audio using this service, however, achieving better learning outcomes will far outweigh the small additional cost of content creation.

When translating content using SAP Enable Now and the SAP Translation Hub integration, Text to Speech content is also translated.  After the text translation, the Text to Speech audio can then be regenerated in the new language, to finalize the translated content asset.

Enterprise-wide relevance

SAP Enable Now can be used to create and deploy knowledge assets for SAP and non-SAP systems.  It can be used to create content for applications, including browser-based applications, such as Ariba and SuccessFactors, and for non-system topics, such as information about new business processes.  Content can be structured to support formal learning events, including complete structured eLearning or classroom training, and can be delivered in bite-sized pieces, to be consumed, when required, by the corresponding user audiences.

Outside the typical scenarios associated with training, SAP Enable Now can also be used to support other business initiatives, such as change management and testing activities associated with system projects.  Information developed in one form, e.g. a Simulation to train system functionality, can be deployed in other forms to support other business activities, e.g. the Simulation can also be delivered as a test script.  By re-purposing existing knowledge assets, organizations can significantly reduce the time and cost of transforming global operations.

Content can be easily modified and instantly republished

Content developed in SAP Enable Now is fully modifiable.  It can be updated, enhanced, or extended at any time and then instantly republished for immediate use by an organization’s workforce.  This means that organizations can quickly develop and deploy content, in multiple languages, to support small or large changes.  This content will be immediately available to allow the corresponding workforce to learn, at a place and time of their choosing.

SAP Enable Now can be used to generate media-rich content in multiple languages to leverage existing work and accelerate transformations

Summary

Globally, organizations are undergoing sustained change to remain relevant and competitive.  This has a significant impact on their workforce and often requires that workforce to re-skill to allow them to effectively operate in their new work environment.

SAP Enable Now is a solution that supports organizations with global business operations to build and sustain the capability of their people.  Using SAP Enable Now, organizations can create and distribute high-quality, media-rich content faster and for a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions.  Content, including audio, can be created, and published in multiple languages for SAP and non-SAP systems and for non-system topics, such as training on business processes.

If you are an SAP Enable Now customer and would like advice about how to obtain greater value from your SAP Enable Now solution, contact your SAP Training and Adoption Customer Engagement Executive (CEE).  If you are unsure how to contact your Training and Adoption CEE, email CEE.education@sap.com and your CEE will be in contact.

Other Enable Now posts

If you are interested in learning more about Enable Now, try one of the following recent posts:

Working with Personas in a Learning Organization

First Steps with SAP Enable Now

Why SAP Enable Now is a Critical Component of all Modern SAP-related Business Transformations