When the SAP Process Is Right, Why Is the Work Still So Hard?
Having the right process in SAP doesn’t necessarily mean getting the work done efficiently. For many employees, everyday tasks still involve navigating multiple screens, entering information across transactions and following steps that go well beyond what their role actually requires.
The challenge is often not the process itself, but the way people interact with it.
SAP transactions are designed to accommodate different roles, scenarios and exceptions. That completeness is important, but it can also create unnecessary complexity for employees performing routine tasks. A maintenance technician closing a work order, for example, may have to navigate several transactions and screens just to complete one task.
At scale, these extra steps have a measurable operational impact. They affect task completion times, employee productivity, training requirements and the time spent on manual administration. As the example of Vattenfall demonstrates, simplifying the user experience can make a significant difference: offshore maintenance tasks were reduced from 20 to 30 SAP screens to just one.
So how can organisations make everyday SAP work simpler without changing the processes and business logic they already rely on?
One approach is to introduce role based applications that present employees with a simpler, task focused interface while retaining SAP’s existing standard and custom business logic. But simplification also needs to be governed properly and measured against tangible business outcomes.
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In this episode
- Why SAP transactions often involve more screens and steps than individual roles require
- The difference between optimising a process and simplifying its execution
- How unnecessary navigation affects productivity and operational efficiency
- Real world examples from Vattenfall and Jollyroom
- How role based applications can simplify the user experience while keeping SAP processes intact
- Five metrics organisations can use to measure the impact of simpler SAP execution
Listen to the latest episode of Neptune Talks to explore why the path through a process matters just as much as the process itself.
