Adoption of your SAP Sales or Service solution by the end users can define the success of your implementation. The ROI from your C4C solution can only be optimal when end-users adopt it. But the question is, how do you define adoption and how do you measure it?
- Would you consider the solution adopted if all your defined users logged in to the system?
- Does that tell you enough about HOW they are using the solution?
- Are they one-time users or active users?
- Is the system being actively used for operational day to day activities?
- Is this reflected in the data in the system?
- Are there discrepancies between the data in the system and what’s otherwise discussed in calls?
- Are there specific regions/roles/users struggling with adoption? Are there data or process issues?
All the above are extremely valid questions that should be planned to be addressed as part of the implementation. If not done yet, it’s never too late
Objective of this blog:
Usage reporting is a critical aspect of adoption. This blog will provide insights into some key aspects and how to reflect it in reporting using standard reporting or by creating your own reports and dashboard using the standard data sources
In the context of maturity stages of the solution and its adoption, active usage of the system is the very first. Here, you encourage all users to start using the system actively and address issues that may be related to system setup, collecting feedback about usability, missing features as well as a reluctance to change
Active Usage of the system
Description - When the system is actively used to capture information, it reflects good adoption and lays the foundation for better tracking and decision making. Check usage from the perspective of users logging in or not, check if master data and transaction data is being created and updated and assess if the usage trend is upward or downward. This prompts management to come up with strategies to address the challenges. Some examples of such metrics are:
Examples of some metrics
| Users logged in -last 7 days |
| Users not logged in -last 7 days |
| Users never logged in |
| Month-wise chart of usage trend |
| General analysis of system performance |
| Active users as a % of subscription users |
| Accounts created -last 3 months |
| Contacts created -last 3 months |
| Opportunities creation trend -last 3 months |
| Leads creation trend -last 3 months |
| Number of Activities created -last 3 months |
| Number of Accounts modified -last 120 days |
| Opportunities not modified in the last 120 days |
| Number of Activities completed -last 3 months |
| Last 3 months' Open tasks |
| Number of Visits (per Sales Rep) |
From a System Usage and Performance perspective, the information shown below is available as a standard. Go to Administration->General Settings->Usage and Response time Statistics.
These are views available to the Administrator so that they can analyze it and share the information as required with specific regions, roles, users etc. to drive adoption
Usage Statistics:
Over a selected date range, this chart shows you the number of users who logged in each day, the average #users, unique total users who logged in (Active) and # Inactive users. Note that even one login is considered as active usage. If this should be different in your case, you can create a custom key figure. This will be explained in a later blog
Response Time Statistics:
- User Interactions by hour – Shows you a percentile view of the response times per week
- Response time by day – Shows you the average network and server time by day. If users complain about performance on a particular day, you can check if there was an issue. If everything looked normal, it could be an issue with the user’s connection, or you can at least rule out network or server time issues
- User interactions by day – Shows you the # of interactions by date
- Avg. Response Times by Hour – yesterday – This can tell you the peak usage times
- User Interactions by hour – This can again tell you the peak usage times
Note: For all reports, you can slice and dice information for your analysis by clicking on the magnifying glass button on the right
As an example of slicing and dicing these reports, you can pull in additional fields for your analysis like the following
Additional key figures for the report Avg Response Times by Day
Additional Characteristics for the report User Interactions by hour
User Logon Activity Reporting
With this view you can get details of the login activity of the users. Since this tracks the users and their IP addresses, you need to ensure that you maintain this setting in Scoping, since companies and countries may have a policy against capturing this information. Below is the scoping question that controls the capturing of this information
Usage Trend and Adoption
This view shows which screens have a high and low consumption, daily trends as well as adoption by individual users
API Usage Statistics
This view gives you a weekly breakdown of the number of oData and SOAP calls being made
Useful standard reports – Here’s a list of some standard reports that you could consume on its own or use to create your own dashboards
Business Analytics -> Reports (Search for term ‘User’ in the Data Source column)
- Business Analytics -> Reports (Search for term ‘Response Time’ in the Data Source column)
Custom Dashboards
Apart from the standard views, you can also create your own dashboards. (Examples of how to achieve some of these will be provided in a later blog)
Example Dashboard 1 – Usage dashboard
The objective of this dashboard is to track active usage and consumption, see trends and identify opportunities to increase consumption
This dashboard provides the following insights:
- Subscription vs Usage over the last 30 days – Out of the total subscription users you have, how many users have logged in at least once vs how many have never logged in
- Users with at least 5 logins in the last 30 days – Active usage is something that may mean different things to different organizations. Is a single login in the last 30 days enough? What is active usage for you? Depending upon your definition, you can create custom key figures and create such a chart. In the above example active usage was defined as at least 5 logins in the last 30 days and displayed as a country-based chart
- Bottom 20 users in the last 30 days – If you’re allowed to track users with their names, you could create such a chart to see which users are struggling with adoption. They could be coached with training materials to increase their adoption
- Weekly usage trend – indicates a general trend based on the #of interactions in the system. Interactions include creation/update/viewing etc. Another perspective of this data is to view it by Country as well as by Work Center
- Finally, it’s a good idea to check the performance of the system. The chart in the example shows network and server time. You can also monitor the SDK time and get an overall idea of how the system is performing
Here's an interesting blog which shares ideas on how to build your usage analysis over a period of time (>30 days) by exposing data for analysis externally in a BI tool
Example Dashboard 2 – Data quality and Usage trends
Purpose - Quality of information is the foundation of better decision making. Even if data is created in a timely manner, if it doesn’t contain relevant information, it would lead to poor adoption since incomplete data is not reliable and cannot be used to do business.
This dashboard displays creation trends of certain objects. The trend should ideally go upwards or stay constant. It should not be declining. It also highlights some quality aspects of the master data in the system. For example – what good is a contact if it doesn’t have an email or a phone number. Similarly – How can you do business with Accounts without contacts?
Further insights into how these custom dashboards and metrics can be designed will be addressed in a later blog
Summary – As you can see, Usage reporting is essential for any administrator and in many ways even for the business users to drive adoption within their own teams. Making it a priority during the early stages itself has many benefits. With time, as the adoption of the solution matures, you would track other metrics too. In your adoption journey, Usage Reporting is a good start!
I encourage you to share your thoughts on this blog, share the metrics, KPIs and reports that you already track or want to track within your organization, how the metrics help you in driving adoption and what more you'd like to see as additional content in later blogs
Cheers!
Vinita
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