Whitepaper

How SAP Users hold the key to Business Process Improvement

Summary
Year after year, Business Process Improvement consistently ranks within the top 3 goals for CIOs of the worlds largest companies. The goal is often deliberately vague. Actually identifying the highest value processes and then systematically and measurably improving them is a skill that few organizations master. This white paper highlights the key role that SAP users play in enabling their organizations to improve processes, and discusses how their expertise and experience is lost in some of the traditional approaches that companies use to try to improve processes. In addition, this paper presents an alternative user-centric approach that will enable companies to sustainably and measurably improve their processes.

2011 Winshuttle, LLC. All rights reserved. 1/11

www.winshuttle.com

Introduction
Employee knowledge, experience and understanding of how the enterprise works are key to improving business processes. Companies understand this and try a variety of methods of using internal knowledge to solve challenges and improve how they operate.

SAP and Business Processes

A business process has been defined by the Workflow Management Coalition, as a set of one or more linked procedures or activities which collectively realize a business objective or policy goal. For the majority of large enterprises, SAP is the key system of record that stores all data concerning the financial and operational performance of the organization. As SAP is the main data repository, understanding how the data is governed in any given SAP process is an important factor in improving that process. Additionally, SAP is a key source of metadata about the processes themselves. Its logging capability can produce reports with a wealth of information on how an activity is currently implemented. Analysis of these reports can highlight the most common transactions and the most time consuming processes.

How SAP Users hold the key to Business Process Improvement

Business Process Improvement The Status Quo

Commonly, companies employ business analysts, or hire outside consultants, who are tasked with improving processes. They traditionally take an overview of a complete process which often covers several groups within an organization. Typically, after interviewing each stakeholder they suggest changes and review these with all the parties involved, including the IT department. Finally, the analyst will document the current process and suggest changes as the blueprint for a project, and along with IT estimate the timeline and budget. The projects are presented to management, prioritized, and allocated a budget.

Challenges with the Status Quo

There are several challenges with this methodology. Firstly, there is a scale issue only processes that are assigned to an analyst receive comprehensive review, leaving many problematic or cumbersome processes untouched. Secondly, there are budgetary constraints - companies have more projects than they have budget to address. They often prioritize based on incorrect assumptions and projects are selected based on hunches or best guesses and not on hard data. In addition, internal politics can influence decisions. Thirdly, things get lost in translation - the analysts role, while vital to co-ordinate cross functional processes, adds an additional layer that can cause communication failures. The analyst has to balance the technical level of the developer and the information they need with the business needs of the user, and even with the best of intentions this can be a very difficult challenge. Finally, this method can be time-consuming and expensive. While it may end with an optimal solution, there are frequently smaller changes that could be implemented quickly and yield dramatic improvements instead of waiting for the analysts holistic solution.

How SAP Users hold the key to Business Process Improvement

Advantages of Empowering Business Users

Empowering business users to improve process bottlenecks allows organizations to avoid many of the challenges previously highlighted. Enterprises can actually make great gains in process improvement thanks to two simple facts: users always outnumber analysts and IT resources, and users are intimately familiar with key process inefficiencies.

Risks and Challenges of User Centric Approach

Despite these benefits, companies are often reluctant to implement user-led process change for several practical reasons including security, administration of user-driven tools and data governance. Additionally, users may not have visibility into a complete process. However, if these challenges can be overcome then the benefits can translate into fast and dramatic positive impact on a business bottom line.

SAP as a Risk Mitigator

SAP enables companies to meet complex regulatory requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley thanks to a range of features designed to specify users access to information based on their role and position within the organization. Having already implemented this risk mitigation capability, businesses can use it as a framework for a user-centric initiative, allowing users to work on the discrete portion of the process (and corresponding data) for which they are authorized in SAP.

Types of Process Improvement

SAP users tend to be busy professionals with many demands on their time. If they are enabled to adjust processes, they will generally attempt to reduce their most time consuming, repetitive tasks. Manual data entry, data maintenance and collecting data for reports are some of the most common tasks that users attempt to automate and make more efficient.

User Driven Change Some Examples and Some Data

Winshuttles tools enable user-centric process improvement and we see many examples of SAP users improving their companys operations. Canada Post has deployed Winshuttle across many departments and is saving, by their own estimate, millions of dollars a year. To quote their business process manager By deploying Winshuttle, we have improved efficiencies and increased productivity by giving employees the tools to enhance their current tasks, and enhanced the quality of data in our SAP solutions.

How SAP Users hold the key to Business Process Improvement

Murray Energy is using Winshuttle to streamline financial processes. To quote their treasury lead, Generating an invoice used to be a four-to five-hour process. But with Winshuttle, it only takes four to five minutes. Winshuttle can be used across departments. Winshuttle tracks usage in a benchmark data base and as you can see from the chart below that users are finding savings across the SAP landscape.

Savings by Module Winshuttle Benchmark Database

Usability and Processes

Frequently the changes that end users make are focused on usability. People often confuse usability with interface, but in fact a systems usability can be defined and measured via several factors including learnability, efficiency, memorability and the frequency of errors . For example, limiting the number of screens and fields a user must interact with to accomplish a task will improve all of the usability factors and is a common example of a user-driven change.

How SAP Users hold the key to Business Process Improvement

Protecting the one version of the Process

Companies ideally want one and only one defined processes for any task. User-driven changes work well in this model because each user is optimizing their component of a process rather than creating a new process. With the correct governance tools in place, such as Winshuttle Central, even the most process-centric organizations can take advantage of their users ingenuity and ideas. Central, allows the process owner to review and approve any suggested improvements and run them against a test system, before rolling out to the production environment.

Managing User Changes

Centralized control and governance is also vital to ensure that user-driven changes can be utilized across an organization and owned by the wider company as the original author changes roles or leaves the company all together. This enables the best ideas to spread and centralized storage ensures consistency.

Continuous Improvement Kaizen for Processes

By creating conditions which enable business users to implement process change themselves; organizations can turn continuous improvement from a concept to a core organizational value. People like to experiment and by giving them the capability and tools to modify how they work, they will continually adjust, not only to improve and save more time, but also to react to changes in the business. Many Winshuttle customers have iterated templates and scripts, sometimes 10 or 20 times, with each revision adding a change for the better, and that is at the heart of the Kaizen philosophy.

Conclusion
By accelerating transactions within SAP, users can streamline their component of a business process. By using desktop tools that they are familiar with and by using data that is already in digital form, both the time taken to enter data and the accuracy of that data can be improved. By leveraging the security inherent within their system of record SAP such an approach can be implemented with an acceptable level of risk. By leveraging centralized control and governance tools, changes can be widely and safely deployed. Making continual process improvement a core organizational value can have a dramatic impact on a companys operational efficiency giving it a tangible and measurable competitive edge in the marketplace.

How SAP Users hold the key to Business Process Improvement

Winshuttle is the ERP Usability Company, providing software products that enable business users to work with SAP directly from Excel, Web forms and other interfaces without any programming. Winshuttle focuses on a simple fact when using SAP applications, time is money. Winshuttles usability solutions radically accelerate SAP user transactions, saving and redirecting millions of dollars for SAPs customers every day. These financial benefits are achieved by significantly reducing employee and contractor costs and increasing resources to address more strategic priorities. Hundreds of customers use Winshuttle to make their SAP lives easier. Headquartered in Bothell, Washington, Winshuttle has offices in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and India. For more information, visit www.winshuttle.com.

Corporate Headquarters
Bothell, WA Tel + 1 (800) 711-9798 Fax + 1 (425) 527-6666 www.winshuttle.com

United Kingdom

London, U.K. Tel +44 (0) 208 704 4170 Fax +44 (0) 208 711 2665 www.winshuttle.co.uk

Germany

Bremerhaven, Germany Tel +49 (0) 471 140840 Fax +49 (0) 471 1701902 www.winshuttle-software.de

France

Maisons-Alfort, France Tel +33 (0) 148 937 171 Fax +33 (0) 143 683 768 www.winshuttle.fr

India

Research & Development Chandigarh, India Tel +91 (0) 172 465 5941 www.winshuttle.in

How SAP Users hold the key to Business Process Improvement