Your SAP journey can significantly impact your technology and processes, but the greatest impact is often on Your People. Adapting to technology changes can be difficult for Your People, as it requires individuals to change the way they do their jobs. That’s why a well-planned Organizational Change Management (OCM) strategy is crucial in ensuring your SAP journey's success.

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Keep your people and your SAP journey on track with these SAPDAY OCM best practices:

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• Determine the right change management sponsorship model. Projects with complex changes and potential resistance require strong, visible sponsors throughout the course of the project. Your SAP journey will tend to bring about a higher degree of change, making the need for active and engaged sponsors that can champion the initiative which is crucial to success
• Keep your stakeholders apprised and involved from the start. Your stakeholders control the systems and processes impacted by the change, maintaining their feedback and support is very important. Keeping them informed will increase adoption and equip them with tools to become effective sponsors
• Find advocates right across your organization. Your advocates are key to encouraging adoption among those who don’t want to change. Finding advocates who are trusted within the organization will greatly increase project credibility and buy-in
• Communicate constantly with everyone – your sponsors, stakeholders, SAP delivery teams, users, etc. You need to know the expectations of your SAP journey, how each group feels about the change and whether there’s a clear understanding of how to use the new SAP system, among many other things. Getting consistent, direct feedback from all groups will enable you to gauge OCM strategy effectiveness and identify new needs​

• Assess, reassess and plan ahead. Leverage feedback to change your OCM strategy and approach as needed. Are there still individuals who oppose the change? Maybe additional resources are required or project sponsors are not as visible as they need to be. Assessing and reassessing will ensure you’re able to correct and overcome barriers as they arise​

• Involve change management early. The likelihood of success drops significantly when change management is brought on later in the project. Collaborating with the project team from the start ensures a more complete picture of the project scope and impact, allowing for the development of a sound OCM strategy that accounts for all potential challenges

• Invest in your people like you would your SAP technology. There’s no way around it – you will never get the results you want out of your SAP system without investing in your people. You must be intentional about helping your people to successfully adopt new technology and processes

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The greatest overall contributor to project success is active and visible sponsorship, as discovered every year by Prosci’s benchmarking research on change management. According to Prosci’s change management benchmarking report, projects with excellent change management are six times more likely to meet objectives than those with poor change management.

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To ensure your SAP journey is set up for success, SAPDAY has developed an OCM for SAP Success Toolkit as part of our OCM solution offerings. This toolkit has the specific methods, deliverables and best practices needed for managing change whilst on your SAP journey. It covers the entire program from blueprint, implementation, testing and hand over to business as

usual – taking the guesswork out of how to best integrate OCM into your SAP journey. In addition, the flexible OCM for SAP Success Toolkit fills in the gaps present in many technology focused SAP methodologies, allowing your organization to have your organizational "Benefits Realized".

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SAPDAY's Change Management Services

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​Leadership Alignment

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As leaders are often being pulled in multiple, sometimes conflicting, directions, it is imperative that that they are aligned on the SAP initiative to ensure fluidity throughout the implementation. If leaders at each level are not aligned, successful outcomes are at risk. SAPDAY will lead you to use a prescribed method and cadence to ensure leadership alignment across your organization.

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Stakeholder Engagement

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SAP transformation requires alignment and consensus within the executive team. Management at all levels must accept responsibility for a timely and successful SAP implementation. SAPDAY will ensure that your entire chain of command take responsibility for the project by developing accountability standards which are reflected in your organizational goal setting process.

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Change Impact Assessment

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While undergoing any SAP change, it is important to know the scale of that change and its impact on your people and your organization. SAPDAY will conduct a change impact analysis that highlights the areas that require more support throughout the implementation and strategies to mitigate them.

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Change Agent Network

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Sometimes SAP change is better received when coming from a familiar source. Change agent networks are put into place to be the bridge, translators and additional source for questions and concerns. SAPDAY will identify people within your organization to provide rapid communications, a forum for people to provide feedback on your SAP initiative and to serve as advocates.

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Organizational Readiness Assessment

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Organizational readiness is a very important process for identifying, evaluating and monitoring the readiness of an organization to accept and adopt changes. The importance of organizational readiness is to monitor and measure adoption effectiveness throughout your initiative. SAPDAY will:

• Conduct surveys and workshops with people across your organization to ensure that your SAP initiative objectives are aligned with your organization’s strategic direction

• Facilitate formal and informal communications with your people and provide feedback

• Conduct an organizational wide readiness assessment to determine the largest areas of organizational resistance

• Identify lessons learned from previous organizational and technology change initiatives

• Assess your people's skills and competencies relative to the SAP skill requirements

• Report back to both your leaders and your people

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Communications Strategy and Plan

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When undergoing any SAP change, those impacted by the change should be well aware of how things will change and how it will affect them. Through highly effective communication strategies and plans, SAPDAY will use a series of communication vehicles and approaches to ensure effective communication throughout your organization, in order to avoid misinformation.

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Learning Strategy and Plan

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We live in an ever changing world that requires us to continuously upskill and innovate to meet organizational demands. While this means having the appropriate SAP technology to ensure organizational efficiency, it also means trained people to effectively use SAP. SAPDAY offers:

• An assessment of your people's needs and SAP skills so that a curriculum can be designed based on roles and responsibilities in order to build confidence to work on your SAP environment

• Hands on SAP Learning with specific storylines and your real life organizational scenarios

• Learning strategies that are more people friendly, engaging and interactive than a static PowerPoint presentation and screenshots         

• A blended learning approach where learning is done face to face and supplemented with remote and online methods for on demand learning. In addition to learning assessments, feedback from your people and ongoing learning to ensure that the knowledge is retained for superior SAP results

• A sustainable and consistent learning approach that provides long term support and knowledge transfer

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Knowledge Transfer and Sustainability

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As all projects come to an end, it is important that your people feel prepared and empowered to continue to utilize SAP. SAPDAY provides effective knowledge transfer to ensure that the change is sustainable. It allows the project team members to fully “own” the project, maintain your SAP landscape, provide people support after go live, support your people's use of SAP and user adoption.

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Organizational Design

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Organizational design is the conscious and deliberate design and building of the SAP architecture, cloud and infrastructure for your organization to align with process and technologies from SAP, as well as to achieve and sustain organizational objectives. SAPDAY will examine the objectives through five main lenses including:

• Process: the way products and services are delivered to your people and external stakeholders such as customers and supplier

• SAP technologies: application excellence and capital enabling process execution

• Organization: the way tasks and procedures are structured, managed and controlled

• People: human assets displaying SAP knowledge, skills, aptitude and ability to perform

• Culture: Alignment of communication, collaboration, people process and leadership styles

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Objectives

 

• Reimagine and explore Your Organization and create new ideas

• Discover and design the capabilities of your unique model to become the "Most Brilliant Organization"

• Transform and scale your operations to become an SAP digital change leader

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SAPDAY Change Management Benefits

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• Reduce the time needed to implement the Change Management

• Better manage the diverse cost of Change Management for your important SAP initiatives

• Blend industry and organizational thought leadership with strong SAP product knowledge

• Close the gap between strategy, consulting, change and technical implementation

• Deliver value by combining management consulting with digital know-how