To run your SAP systems and your SAP competence centre efficiently and effectively you need to secure a constantly evolving talent pipeline. Whether it’s for project implementation and roll-out, maintenance and support, upgrades or documentation, your business growth is dependent on the quality and skill sets of your people.
The structure of the average SAP competence centre is often unnecessarily expensive. Getting the balance right between experienced personnel and younger talent is critical to avoid a top heavy and costly structure. Challenges can include:
- Over 40% of support tickets have a low degree of complexity
- 70% of the support employees/consultants have more than two years’ experience
- Too many of the low complexity tickets are treated by too experienced profiles
- Bottlenecks are created because the distribution of tickets isn’t optimal
1. Get the optimal balance of seniority
Maintaining the optimal balance of seniority on your implementation projects could make a considerable impact on cost reduction by as much as 15%, as well as increasing the ROI on your implementation projects.
SAP trainees can meet the demand for skills, increase resolution times and create a cost-effective balance of seniority within your SAP competence centre. By reducing the percentage of senior and experienced consultants in favour of SAP graduates not only saves you money but frees up senior staff to focus on higher complexity tasks. Trainees help reduce the response times of support tickets and accelerate low complexity customer tasks.
2. Improve the quality of your SAP competence centre
Deploying SAP graduates can improve the quality of your SAP competence center and reduce the need for more costly senior staff. If well trained, younger SAP graduates can add value in a range of different SAP competences including:
- SAP application management – incident handling, small changes, preventive maintenance, upgrade and patches
- SAP User Support – 1st line end user support, end user documentation
- Business continuity services – technical installations and upgrades, proactive SAP monitoring, daily system administration and cloud hosting
- SAP testing and validation – test scenario maintenance, remote test execution, testing tools and automation testing
- SAP support centre – set up and improvement of internal support resources, 3rd line support for less common modules, tool and methodology (ITIL) support
3. Increase your social responsibility
Engaging with a younger skilled team of people can bring all sorts of benefits to your business, including growing your own workforce in a cost-effective way rather than buying in skills later on, improving your employer brand and bridging your future skills gaps.
By hiring and training younger employees who are already SAP competent you can add value to the business from day one and increase your social responsibility.
How the SOA People Academy can help you secure your SAP talent pipeline
Each year the SOA People Academy recruits up to 60 graduates onto its SAP training program. Once selected, these graduates spend seven weeks being given intensive high-level training, coaching and mentoring to become an SAP consultant across different disciplines, including supply chain, finance and business intelligence.
We’re extending our SOA People Academy of trained SAP graduates to give participating customers the opportunity to access and trial future SAP resources without obligation.
Together we can give young SAP trained graduates the chance to launch their careers, adding value and delivering excellence to your SAP projects. If you’re looking to save up to 20% on projects and up to 30% on support costs, contact us to find out more.