SAP Change Management
Ensure engagement by stakeholders and mitigate risk
SAP solutions such as SAP Business All-in-One and SAP Business One offer exceptional benefits to an organization. But those promised benefits may not materialize without buy-in by all the stakeholders and users.
Effectively managing the changes that occur throughout implementation of SAP is critical to realizing the anticipated business benefits. It’s natural for resistance to occur when people are expected to change how they work. Clear communications about roles, processes and changes, including proper training and end-user input during development, are necessary to ensure the changes occur as smoothly as possible yielding the greatest business benefit.
Change Management is driven by the needs of the business and provides strategy and methodology based on insight into the people, processes, and technology behind successful enterprise implementations. A successful Change Management strategy addresses all of the following areas:
Leadership Engagement/Change Agent
Developing sponsorship and cascading leadership throughout to ensure leaders are aligned with the outcome and fully understand the anticipated benefits. This helps to secure agreement among the organization and project leadership and build commitment.
Transition Management
Facilitating the capture and validation of organizational change impacts, addressing business processes, terminology, policies, procedures, roles and responsibilities.
Communications
Increasing commitment by building awareness and understanding.
Change Readiness/Risk Assessment
Assessing change history, readiness, commitment and ability to accept and sustain change. This helps highlight and understand the organization’s ability to change and then guides the strategy to address the critical areas that need attention.
Education & Training/Team Development
Educating and transferring knowledge, skills and abilities to project team members and end-users.
Stakeholder Engagement
Engaging all the stakeholders involved from executives to the implementation team and end users.
• Organization leadership
Leadership alignment enables effective decisions by those in management roles, from C-level executives to the steering committee to business unit leaders and product leaders. Our Change Management team works with the entire leadership group to design the process of communication and clarify responsibilities to make sure the SAP implementation is successful.
• Implementation team
Our Change Management team works with your process team to identify exactly what is changing and in turn design the communications needed to help stakeholders understand how they will be impacted by the SAP system implementation.
• End users of software
SAP changes the way people work, which always meets with tremendous resistance. The more people know about the processes, system, how they will be affected, and what the change will look like, the more you can diffuse resistance and experience end-user acceptance.
Change Management pays particular attention to the people throughout the organization impacted by the SAP implementation, to ensure engagement at every level. Our consultants develop engagement and risk mitigation strategies to address issues and barriers to implementation.
Contact us today to learn how SophLogic can deliver the value and results your business needs.
“An effective SAP Change Management solutions makes peace before the
SAP war can begin. It provides a credible rationale for change. It delivers
the organization and group support that gets an organization through a
sustained period of uncertainty and disruption. It equips people to adopt
new, better ways of work. And it proves that the uncertainty and tumult
was worth it by demonstrating where, how, and to what extent you are gaining
hard and strategic benefits from SAP.”
- Michael Doane,
The New SAP Blue Book
“The communications stream is very important throughout your SAP implementation.
You must send the right messages and help users understand they will be
trained and well prepared, let them know their jobs are going to change
but they will be supported.”
- Claire
Fisher, Senior SAP Change Management Consultant, SophLogic Global LLC
