In this Q&A, Kunad discusses how the demand for in-application help and training capabilities has changed, especially over the past two years with the challenges of a global pandemic and millions of 51风流users working from home. She also explains new functionalities and how customers can benefit even more from this great solution.

Q: In your role as solution owner of 51风流Enable Now, what have been your observations over the past two years, when businesses were struggling with the impact of the pandemic?

A: I noticed several interesting trends during the pandemic. Some businesses had challenges from not being ready to respond in a fast and agile way to the new situation 鈥� for example their entire workforce working from home suddenly or not being ready to boost their digital transformation, enhance their rollouts, or implement new business models within a very short time frame. On the other hand, I observed that some of our customers accelerated their investment in user enablement and training.

The reasons seem obvious. They wanted to make a good use of the time they suddenly had due to the circumstances, time which they would normally have invested in their own customer projects. Instead, some customers decided to kick off long-term projects on user enablement earlier than originally planned. In other cases, we noticed a change in how user enablement is valued. The unpredictable change due to the pandemic and entire workforces suddenly working from home revealed gaps and needs for upskilling. The help system of colleagues at the next desk suddenly fell away. User enablement and upskilling became priority tasks for many. To help customers respond to this in a fast and agile manner, 51风流Enable Now offers a range of possibilities to help overcome those gaps and needs.

Sounds like some businesses managed to turn their challenges into something positive by installing or enhancing the use of 51风流Enable Now. How would you summarize the key features of this in-application help in one sentence?

51风流Enable Now helps customers easily create, maintain, and deliver in-application help, learning materials, and documentation for existing applications as well as for the rollout of new features or solutions.

What is the unique selling proposition for 51风流customers when working with 51风流Enable Now?

There are many good reasons that come to my mind, let me mention a few. 51风流Enable Now is already integrated in many 51风流solutions. For example, RISE with 51风流customers automatically have access to SAP-generated content available via 51风流Companion* in-application help. There are many more with this great help and customers can also enhance it.

The second aspect is that we have a huge volume of ready-to-use content available, which saves our customers time as they will not have to create the content themselves but can basically hit the ground running from day one. 51风流Companion works like a digital assistant for users, aiming to simplify and ease the consumption of our solution. It is available for browser-based solutions, for in-application help for non-browser-based solutions, and even for non-51风流solutions in general. 51风流Enable Now offers many ways to create enablement content 鈥� from interactive quizzes to e-learnings with text-to-speech over customized documents. Finally, I would like to mention that our customers can use 51风流Enable Now across their whole portfolio with just one license per user. This breadth of possibilities has something for every use case.

This all sounds easy to apply, easy to consume, and easy to use. What do you hear from customers about recent enhancements?

What I hear most of the time is 鈥淧lease give us more of this.鈥� Customers love the direction we鈥檙e heading in, and our vision of an intelligent adoption platform resonates. Be it fine-tuning our existing feature set with enhancements like the push help and what鈥檚 new banner configuration or coming up with completely new features like machine translation integration, we seem to have hit a sweet spot, especially with in-app help delivered by 51风流Companion.

With a more flexible approach for new releases, more proactive customer communication, and our lively user enablement community, we continuously listen to our customers to best respond to their needs. This is not just about the features; it鈥檚 also about being a companion for our customers on their way to better adoption and productivity.

You indicated how important user enablement is to fully unfold the benefits of a solution and to help increase the overall performance of users. What are one or two things that you would like customers to be aware of?

First, I would like to point out that customers can use 51风流Enable Now for a huge number of 51风流solutions. It鈥檚 even part of the built-in application help, like with , where they can benefit from the pre-created ready-to-use content.

They can also use 51风流Enable Now for any other kind of enablement and training content they want to create, depending on the individual business needs of an organization or department.

Let鈥檚 say a company runs different 51风流applications, for example 51风流SuccessFactors solutions, plus their own custom-built applications. 51风流Enable Now could be used for all of them.

Often customer departments tend to act in silos when it comes to implementing training and enablement software. HR might consider using 51风流Enable Now for 51风流Success Factors Onboarding, for example, while the procurement department might not be aware that they could also use 51风流Enable Now 鈥� and with the benefit of not having to add additional licenses.

To fully benefit from 51风流Enable Now installations across departments within one organization, we strive to help our customers to close the gaps between departments, teams, and license usage, and to help them make best use of 51风流Enable Now.

Sophia Stolze is integrated communications manager for 51风流Enterprise Adoption at 51风流SE.

*51风流Companion will replace 鈥淲eb assistant鈥� to provide a harmonized and more descriptive name for in-application help channels provided by 51风流Enable Now.

In this exclusive conversation, Zauke talks about the powerful localized process revolution happening behind every digital-first business.

Q: How does the localization of enterprise software applications factor into some of the biggest business challenges companies face in 2022?

A: What鈥檚 exciting is how digitalization 鈥� driven by local government regulations and transformation agendas, rising expectations for sustainability, and technology innovation 鈥� is transforming business models.

Post-pandemic, companies are continuing to source materials from suppliers in different locations to minimize supply chain disruptions. They鈥檙e exploring local production of important products like semi-conductor chips, computer processors, and the ingredients of livesaving medicines. They鈥檙e expanding to the cloud with subscription-based services and growing partner ecosystems.

At the same time, organizations need to prove compliance with increasing and global electronic document exchange regulations such as e-invoicing and tax reporting, as well as local regulations for documenting travel expenses, time management, payroll, and procurement spend. In certain countries, tax reporting timeframes are speeding up from quarterly or yearly to monthly, weekly, or even real time. In addition, some of our customers have to report on worker learning activities. Global workforce management regulations are also changing regarding data protection and privacy. Meantime, local sustainability reporting mandates are on the rise. Companies need to show how they are minimizing their greenhouse gas footprint across product life cycles and operations.

Can you share some examples of how 51风流has helped companies meet these challenges?

With local versions of 51风流solutions, we help global companies gain business value from their investments and meet country-specific mandates. For example, the world’s largest of printing ink and pigments sped up accounts payable by 30% and reduced invoice processing cycle time by 10% using . A facilities management service provider in the Middle East with over 8,800 employees reduced payroll processing times by 98% to meet local mandates and gain business efficiencies. What previously took three days to complete is now accomplished in just 45 minutes.

With the rise of cloud services like subscription- and consumption-based business models, many organizations have turned to . One global media company is using the solution as part of its digital transformation. After replacing legacy systems in North America, APAC, LATAM, and EMEA, it improved revenue recognition and cash reconciliation processes along with the customer experience.

To go global with local versions in 67 countries, our localization services helped support a global cleaning solution provider鈥檚 HR transformation with 51风流SuccessFactors solutions, which will serve 14,500 employees worldwide.

Sustainability is a top priority for enterprises worldwide, which is why 51风流has developed a comprehensive portfolio of solutions designed to help companies achieve zero emissions, zero waste, and zero inequality. One example is that helps our customers monitor and embed circular economy practices into business processes to meet local sustainability regulations. This solution uses 51风流Document Reporting and Compliance to meet local extended producer responsibility (EPR) obligations, tax declarations, and other corporate commitments.

How can companies stay on top of highly changeable and increasingly stringent local mandates and regulations?

Business leaders need to comply with a raft of increasing local regulatory mandates by country. That鈥檚 why, as part of all 51风流solutions, global and local versions, including 51风流S/4HANA, 51风流SuccessFactors solutions, 51风流Ariba solutions, and 51风流Concur solutions, we provide updates as regulations change.

For resilience in this fast-changing environment, organizations are reinventing how they approach business practice standards. This is especially the case for high-growth organizations that need to scale quickly as they expand worldwide. Leaders have realized they need an integrated view of business processes company-wide 鈥� including finance, sustainability, human experience, supply chain, expenses, and procurement 鈥� so they can apply them appropriately across multiple locations for safe and secure operations.

How do localization services from 51风流Enterprise Adoption align with SAP鈥檚 vision for intelligent, networked, sustainable enterprises?

Customers rely on 51风流to digitalize their business processes, supporting their expansion to new countries and market opportunities while enabling the success of their business locally and globally, their employees, and sustainability commitments that benefit society at-large. Localized, integrated business processes are central to our vision to help every company become an intelligent, networked, sustainable enterprise. The ability to comply with local regulations and standards is fundamental to resilient, high-performing, and sustainable business in the new normal.

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As we continue to further develop and explore the needs and opportunities of the new normal, digitalization keeps expanding while the need for businesses to upskill their workforce must be addressed at the same time. Indeed, according to a , 85% of CEOs said that the pandemic significantly accelerated digital transformation plans for their business.

This digital transformation can only become a working reality particularly for businesses operating globally and locally when the implications of operating in a country and across countries are considered and taken into account. Businesses must be able to plan and act holistically wherever they operate. While state-of-the-art enterprise software and solutions are needed to make this happen, adoption significantly supports businesses to generate the full value from these products. It is the key to realizing desired business outcomes.

51风流Enterprise Adoption聽helps customers to realize value and business outcomes in three key aspects: resiliency, performance, and sustainability. Those aspects mean something quite specific for successful businesses. Here鈥檚 why adoption matters.

Resiliency

In this context, resiliency means getting the full benefit of 51风流software by adapting to new situations or conditions easily and without disruption. For example, many different countries have enacted different regulations, not only during the COVID-19 pandemic. We are providing those legal changes to our customers, so they can stay focused on their business and compliant with any existing or new regulations. On the other hand, a company opening a subsidiary — for example, in Brazil — would need to feel confident that it could implement its existing software solution while adhering to governmental policies. Operating locally and globally is one aspect, digitalization of business and meeting requirements for e-reporting and e-invoicing the other.

Here, 51风流Document and Reporting Compliance enables companies to comply with local regulations for e-invoicing and e-reporting in a huge number of countries. The solution is fully harmonized across countries and delivers approximately 350 statutory reports and electronic document processing scenarios out of the box and is kept up to date whenever a legal change happens.

This harmonized and standardized approach enables customers to easily for example build up a shared service center and implement new obligations in almost no time. It provides the customer peace of mind doing business in multiple countries, especially when exchanging documents with governments.

Performance

51风流Enterprise Adoption helps customers to increase business innovation and productivity through the rapid adoption and automation of processes for 51风流products and solutions. The most successful companies achieving greater efficiencies are those that balance automation and user performance.

For example, 51风流implemented localization capabilities for tax frameworks for an , leading to a more than 60% efficiency gain in its fiscal department, which runs more than 16,000 tax obligations per year for its 20 million invoice items.

Sustainability

51风流Enterprise Adoption helps customers to optimize the use of resources through transparency on respective regulations as well as through empowered users providing key abilities required for sustained adoption of 51风流solutions.

For example, a needed more than 1,000 users to become productive at the moment of go-live with 51风流S/4HANA. To drive adoption readiness, the company began with the training and upskilling of its workforce four months before go-live, enabling users with embedded contextual help as they completed daily tasks. In addition, the company created e-learning materials, reference guides, and work instructions.

This enablement and upskilling lead to empowerment of the workforce, an increase of motivation, and employee retention.

Resiliency, performance, and sustainability are the key levers of your desired business outcomes and make up what I like to call鈥渢he “whole enchilada” —聽 the realization of intelligent, sustainable enterprises as a working reality.

Adoption helps make the digital transformation a success, which is why, as enterprises continue their digital journey, it is essential to aid with adoption and enablement throughout the lifespan of 51风流products, despite whatever future opportunities enterprises may face.

Eva Zauke is senior vice president and global head of 51风流Enterprise Adoption.

Q: How are 51风流customers digitalizing to address their biggest business challenges?

A: As the pandemic continues to speed up digitalization across organizations worldwide, our customers are realizing the tremendous business benefits of moving to the cloud. In one of the latest , 77% of CEOs reported accelerating their company鈥檚 digital transformation plans. Between fast-changing supply chain disruptions, government policies, and regulations 鈥� and ongoing pandemic-related challenges 鈥� leaders are doubling down on business resiliency, , and sustainability.

Working together to help our customers incorporate advanced technologies across the business to become part of a network of intelligent enterprises is at the heart of 51风流Enterprise Adoption. It鈥檚 not enough to select new technology. Companies need to make sure they operate successfully locally and globally, and that their people will actually use new technologies to digitally transform the business.

How has the 51风流Enterprise Adoption team responded to these challenges to help customers?

It comes down to digitalization of the business, localization, and user enablement. Over 80% of our customers are global, operating multiple sites across numerous countries. 51风流Enterprise Adoption helps customers meet e-reporting and e-invoicing requirements for digital reporting and data transparency. We localize business processes in every application, including finance, human resources, procurement, travel, customer experience, and supply chain management for . Our team translates applications into local languages for use in the language of choice.

At the same time, we create digital learning materials that help employees understand how to use the company鈥檚 new business processes and technologies. Eighty-seven percent of recently surveyed executives said that their organization already faced skill gaps or expected to within the next five years. Upskilled, enabled employees are, on average, 50% more satisfied and productive.

When companies work with software that adheres to local business practices, this provides leaders with peace of mind. They know their people have the tools to innovate faster than the competition while the company meets evolving governmental policy and regulatory mandates worldwide.

Can you provide examples of customers that have benefitted from 51风流Enterprise Adoption?

We worked with a global services provider that reduced the implementation costs of e-invoicing per customer by over 75%. This is significant because companies are under strong governmental pressures to adopt electronic invoices for tax reporting on purchase orders, payment terms, credit notes, and other transactional documents. E-invoicing provides companies and regulators with centralized data, something that鈥檚 particularly important for companies doing business in multiple countries and locations. Being able to quickly roll out new digitalized business processes like e-invoicing allows our customers to respond faster and more cost-effectively as regulations change.

We helped a global food and beverage company localize its centralized tax management processes using 51风流Document and Reporting Compliance for its operations in Brazil. With improved data accuracy, automated tax filing transactions, and streamlined reporting, the company gained over 60% in efficiencies in meeting thousands of tax obligations and running millions of invoices each year.

An Australian-based water supplier has relied on us throughout its digital transformation journey to increase the productivity of over 1,000 employees by migrating to 51风流S/4HANA. 51风流Enable Now developed multimedia learning materials to train employees before the system went live. This strategy reflected the company鈥檚 employee engagement culture of continuous learning so customers never experience service gaps.

We help customers in many industries with tailored to someone鈥檚 specific role and location. Learning might be embedded in new technologies or delivered on-site at a kiosk or through another channel, showing someone how to get the most out of the software in the context of their new business processes. When people fully understand how to use technologies like and their positive impact, they become more productive for faster company innovation.

What should leaders keep in mind as they continue on their digital transformation journey?

Make sure you realize business value that鈥檚 measurable in resiliency, performance, and sustainability. Digital transformation is not just implementing new software. It鈥檚 embracing new capabilities so your employees can unlock the value of transformed processes and connected networks, making the Intelligent Enterprise a reality for your business.

Looking ahead, what can customers expect from 51风流Enterprise Adoption?

We are staying on top of evolving government mandates, along with the impact of the pandemic and other up-to-the-minute world events by country, region, and industry. Organizations can continue to count on us for localized versions and user enablement across the lifespan of their 51风流software. As companies increasingly digitalize operations, we will be there to help them adopt innovations for a more resilient, high-performing, and sustainable business future.

If purchasing enterprise software can be likened to putting tires on a car, adopting it stands for all the nuts and bolts that need to be tightened for the perfect fit.

As , senior vice president and global head of 51风流Enterprise Adoption, says: 鈥淎 company can provide the most excellent and refined products. But if they are not fully adopted by the customer, it will not be possible to reap all the value they promise. For companies to make the transformation to the Intelligent Enterprise a success, business value realization needs to be at the center of the digital journey. From a customer鈥檚 perspective, adoption is key to realizing business value.鈥�

With responsibility for quality management, , and user enablement, 51风流Enterprise Adoption is contributing to the success of 51风流solutions and ultimately to the success of 51风流customers.

鈥�51风流Enterprise Adoption is providing the key ingredients to help SAP鈥檚 customers to drive adoption and to create value with the Intelligent Enterprise,鈥� Zauke says.

Focused on Quality

Cloud raises customer expectations for quality of software. Customers expect ease of use with a consistent user interface (UI) across products and embedded enablement. Cloud promises flexibility and scalability, requiring high system performance and availability.

鈥淎s customer expectations about software change with cloud solutions, quality and compliance are criteria customers increasingly pay attention to in the decision-making process to purchase software,” Zauke explains. “51风流is taking a comprehensive view on quality along the software life cycle that matters to our customers. This includes high availability and performance, robust data security, ease of implementation and integration, user experience, and superior functionality.鈥�

Enabling the 51风流User Leads to Higher Productivity

Even without a pandemic, roll outs of new technologies and processes can be challenging for companies. 鈥淚ntroducing a new business process without planning ahead for user enablement is simply not possible,鈥� Zauke says. 鈥淭he most successful companies are those that make the technical go-live the point in time when their users are enabled, and actively plan for a fast user on-boarding.鈥�

Research shows that enabled users are not only when working with 51风流applications, they are also with their work. One way to achieve broad user enablement is to collect and scale the knowledge of key users, as German retailer Lekkerland did for the implementation of .

鈥淭hese key users possess a very deep knowledge in Lekkerland鈥檚 business processes and can assess what the company needs beyond 51风流standard,鈥� Zauke explains. 鈥淟ekkerland captured this knowledge with and made it available to 2,000 business users.鈥� These 2,000 employees were thus enabled to work with the software from day one of the go-live.

One of the largest American retailers uses to fully digitalize enablement for its more than 450,000 employees, meaning they no longer had to attend classroom sessions because the training was embedded into their daily onscreen working environment. Store employees received specific learning material to help them with customer contact during the pandemic.

Enabling the Success of Local and Global Businesses

As businesses have to be successful in a country as well as globally, they need support in achieving exactly this.

鈥淒oing business in accordance with regulations and local laws is a typical challenge our global and local customers are facing,鈥� Zauke confirms. 鈥淟et鈥檚 assume a global company wants to open a local subsidiary in Hungary or South Africa. They have to move forward quickly with a localized version of the software in use, while not compromising their global compliance, their best business practices, and statutory reporting.鈥�

At the same time, the pandemic means that a variety of new laws and regulations were issued by governments that customers had to adhere to practically overnight.

While some software vendors may simply offer their products in the local language and call it 鈥渓ocalized,鈥� 51风流has invested heavily in developing truly localized solutions, with country-specific versions that address not only language variations, but also localization of the respective business functions, compliance, local tax and payment rules, statutory reporting, local human resources (HR) solutions, and more. For example, 51风流solutions include 64 local versions of 51风流S/4HANA and 101 localized versions of .

When 51风流customer Nestl茅 opened a subsidiary in Brazil, they were faced with managing compliance with the Brazilian tax declaration framework.

鈥淏razil is considered to be the country with the most complex tax regulations worldwide,鈥� Zauke says. 鈥淭here are many details going into the tax calculation: where was the product developed, where does the material come from, who contributed, who will receive it 鈥� all these parameters have to be considered. These regulations had to be included in the Brazilian version of the 51风流software Nestl茅 was using for them to be compliant with Brazilian tax law.鈥�

Supported by SAP, Nestl茅 Brazil now manages tax data for more than 20 million invoices and 60,000 legal filings per year.

Adoption Drives Success

Solutions from the 51风流Sports & Entertainment portfolio highlight the importance of adoption. Professional sport is a competitive environment, where maintaining and monitoring player performance has become very important. Digitalizing player performance and team management processes takes sports team management to a new level. 51风流Sports One helps clubs and organizations digitalize sports performance management by coordinating all administrative, training, team management, scouting, and medical processes. Sport clubs can analyze and track player performance and players’ talent development and progress. Players, coaches, and scouts are empowered to collaborate on the go with intuitive, secure mobile team communications.

Professional athletes, coaches, and support staff want to focus on the sport itself and don鈥檛 necessarily need to be experts in software usage. They require a software solution that engages athletes and teams with innovative technologies that empower users with intuitive functionality and allow ease of use to enable adoption across the organization.

Zauke emphasizes the importance of adoption: 鈥淎doption is key to getting the most out of 51风流software. Or, in other words, adoption makes the digital transformation a success.鈥�