SAP TechEd Blog Posts
Share your experiences about SAP TechEd: Write about your favorite sessions and other conference highlights.
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Former Member

When I was asked to present a session focused on people at SAP TechEd 2013 Las Vegas, I had my doubts.  The session, When People Are Depending On You, You Have To Depend On Your People, did not seem to fit in with the many technology focused sessions, such as Synchronizing Enterprise Data to SAP HANA.  But much to my surprise, the lecture room filled quickly with folks eager to engage in this people-oriented conversation!

Our underlying topic was end user performance.  We all know that workforce skills are the key ingredient for producing the bottom-line value executives expect from an SAP investment.  But if you don’t know the real day-to-day competence of your SAP workforce, you can’t pinpoint performance gaps or remediation needs, either during implementation or over the long term.  At SAP TechEd, we discussed tools and processes for discovering and addressing SAP user performance needs, and ways to handle issue diagnosis, remediation, and success monitoring.

User performance monitoring:  We’re well beyond “stopwatch technology”

There are many ways to investigate user issues.  A customer at SAP TechEd told me a funny story about a situation where his organization was struggling with reports of slow response times in its call center.  IT checked all the back-end system monitoring tools and proudly announced, “Everything is green - no issues.”  After repeated failed attempts to convince frustrated users that there really was no system problem, this gentleman grabbed a stopwatch and headed to the call center for some good old fashioned measuring of his own.  Lo and behold, the users were right…the system really was slow!

Many in the audience at my SAP TechEd session could identify with this story.  In fact, they had lived it!  Perhaps that is why they lit up when we looked at a powerful solution that offers the kind of true end user visibility that might have helped them identify their issues much more quickly – the SAP User Experience Management application by Knoa.  No matter where a user navigates within SAP, this application can quickly pinpoint true system response times, where users are experiencing errors, and a host of other user-focused metrics.

But does measuring user performance really matter?  It sure does when you consider….

·         75% of system and application errors are never reported

·         30% of performance problems are caused by user behavior

·         90% of IT help desk call time is about finding missing information

·         50-60% of application functionality is not used because end users don’t have the knowledge to take advantage of it

Improving user adoption and performance in your business

If your goal is to drive user adoption, increase user performance, and lower user support costs, then SAP User Experience Management might be your answer.  Perhaps you are like those who attended my “people oriented” session at SAP TechEd who realize that the best system in the world is useless if you don’t have people productively using it!

If you’d like to learn more about this unique application from a customer who uses it, join us for this live event:

How Has Johns Manville Improved Operations,
User Satisfaction, and Support Costs?

Thursday, November 7, 2013
1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. PacificSpeaker:  Jesse Bernal, Jr., Service Delivery Manager, Johns Manville

Register now