When first exposed to mySAP CRM, people often view it as more complex and less user-friendly than conventional CRM/sales force tools such as Microsoft Outlook and Excel. A significant prerequisite for success is an effective and comprehensive change management program that starts at the project kick-off.

To motivate employees to use mySAP CRM, upper management should clearly communicate the goals of the mySAP CRM implementation and explain how these goals are relevant at the sales/marketing employee level. Often change management is a separate implementation project staffed by specialists in business process management with little knowledge of mySAP CRM. This can lead to disconnects between business process changes developed by the change management team and the application software being customized.

Many often see the change management process as simply a training effort — how to use the new system. This view does not address the management issues that drove the decision to implement a new system and the business improvements adopters expect with the new system. For the purposes of this article, change management refers to the actions performed to ensure the successful transition from the current environment to the new environment. The following five tips will make that transition successful.

1. Understand the connection between performance measures and business procedures.

2. Ensure that the new system enables users to succeed in their positions.

3. Implement improvements that encourage users to adopt the new system.

4. Offer support during the transition period.

5. Provide incentives for system adoption.

The Implementation roadmap in Figure 1 outlines the major steps involved in a mySAP CRM implementation project. In each step, the Change management tasks show you how you can apply these five tips to a typical project.

Figure 1

Roadmap of change management tasks for a mySAP CRM implementation click here for a larger version of this image

Tip 1. Understand the connection between performance measures and business procedures. A common question asked when a teacher introduces new material (especially difficult material) is, “Will this be on the test?” In this case, the “test” involves key performance indicators (KPIs) often tied to your compensation and advancement, so determining what is important (i.e., on the test) is critical to maximizing success within a given time frame.

You take actions that improve your KPI, often regardless of the ultimate benefit to your company. Consequently, at the start of a mySAP CRM implementation project it is important to clearly establish the business justification for it (e.g., increase sales volume by 10 percent per year while maintaining 2004 trade promotion spending levels). Once you establish goals, you must also create measurement criteria that support attainment of the goals. In this instance, a KPI confined to sales volume would not support reaching the stated goal of maintaining 2004 trade promotion spending levels. Instead, a measure of trade dollars per sales volume is more appropriate.

You also need to make sure that the tools you use to measure progress toward your goals are consistent with the new way of doing business. You must evaluate old assessment reports against the new goals to determine whether these reports support your goals and represent valid measurements. A report re-created in the new environment but inapplicable to the new goals delivers a clear message — the new goals will not be “on the test.”

For example, a legacy contact management system captured visits to customers during the month. In previous years, each account in a territory was assigned a visit frequency per month. A report comparing planned to actual visits by a salesperson was one of the measures used to evaluate the salesperson’s performance.

During the mySAP CRM implementation, one of the project goals was to differentiate customer service based on the profitability of the customer to the business. A graph showing net sales on one axis and number of visits (based on activity documents) on a second axis would display outliers — for example, a large number of visits resulting in low net sales or a fewer number of visits resulting in higher net sales (Figure 2).

Figure 2

Sample graph showing net sales per visit

Notice the trend line in the graph. It appears that the effort expended for business partners 1548 and 2246 is not reciprocated in increased sales. The trend line indicates where shifts in the salesperson’s effort might lead to a greater increase in sales (perhaps business partner 1617). If the project stores the number of visits per month and the report comparing target visits to actual is still executed and used for evaluation, then salespeople have no reason to change their selling patterns. The goal to differentiate service based on the profitability of the customer will not be met.

The tendency to hold on to old reports seems greater as you climb higher up the management ladder. Senior management should spearhead the definition and adoption of new performance measures and encourage adoption of them throughout the organization. The change management team needs to validate that performance measures throughout the organization support the new vision and the retirement of old processes and procedures.

Tip 2. Ensure that the new system enables users to succeed in their positions. Salespeople may reject a new system if they perceive that using it means they spend less time selling and more time performing administrative tasks. For instance, you may want to implement mySAP CRM to provide sales process access to everyone who interacts with customers. This often requires salespeople to enter more data into the system at an earlier stage than required in the legacy environment. In this case, the main beneficiaries of this extended data entry are people who interact with salespeople and not the salespeople themselves.

In R/3, you normally do not create a customer master data record until a salesperson enters a quote into the system. At most, you might enter presales activities and customer support activities, such as customer phone calls and sales presentations, into a standalone contact management application. To transition to mySAP CRM, salespeople need to enter business partners and contacts into the system as master data to associate them with documented activities shared with authorized users. Your change management team could offset this extra work with features that reduce their workloads and include initiatives such as decreasing ad hoc information requests. When the system is properly set up, instead of asking salespeople for the information, users can obtain it directly through mySAP CRM reports.

You can configure the format of such reports as a view in the Business Partner Cockpit (Figure 3). In this view, users set the type of transactions, status, and number of transactions.

Figure 3

Business Partner Cockpit open activities and transactions click here for a larger version of this image

From an implementation perspective, it is important that you document types of ad hoc information requests, capture necessary data to answer these requests within the system, and train requestors to mine the information themselves. Finally, you must design role descriptions that indicate that requestors are responsible for retrieving the information so that the workload is actually reduced.

Tip 3. Implement improvements that encourage users to adopt the new system. Many companies have official systems and unofficial systems for managing CRM data. To move users away from their homegrown tools, you can eliminate the need for such tools through business process changes that make the tools irrelevant.

You can also incorporate the homegrown tools’ functionalities into the new system. For this option, the implementation team should gather information about these “unofficial”(though labor-saving) applications that users incorporate into their daily work and validate that the activities are germane to the future vision. It is just as important to gather information on time-consuming manual processes that may be automated with the new system.

A good example of a manual process is the creation, distribution, and analysis of an ad hoc questionnaire concerning a placement of a new product display at customer stores. A sales representative fills out the information, which is then collected, collated, and analyzed manually. With mySAP CRM, you could attach a questionnaire to an activity sent to all sales representatives associated with a specific customer type. They fill out the questionnaires on their next visit and then record and store the information in mySAP CRM. Instead of manually analyzing the results, you can extract the individual questionnaires to SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence (SAP BI) and report on the data using standard reporting tools.

Peer leaders in each department should make sure to retire functionality rendered obsolete with the system and clearly convey this to the users. You should include process improvements in the new system to persuade users to change as quickly as possible.

For example, salespeople may currently use Microsoft Excel to produce graphs of sales data for customer presentations. Each salesperson downloads his or her own data into a flat file, imports the file into a spreadsheet, and then manipulates the data to produce the desired graphs. Technically savvy salespeople may create macros to help automate the process and then share them with other salespeople in their district. The resulting presentations make powerful tools in selling promotions and new products into an account. Since these efforts are done out in the field, the IT department often does not know about them or the need to produce graphic presentations. When the new system requirements are developed, this requirement is either not captured or deemed an extra that can be added later.

mySAP CRM’s integration with SAP BI provides a mechanism to provide this type of reporting directly from the reporting database. Once it is structured, you can capture the latest data by simply refreshing the report. Providing customer-facing tools to both the internal and external sales force is the equivalent of adopting your company’s internal best practices across the sales force. In Figure 4 you select the workbook, Campaign Generated Revenue by Customer, and then display it in Excel. See Figure 5 for a sample output of this workbook. Most SAP customers post actual shipments to the data warehouse each evening. If you pull up the report the next day and refresh it, you would see the latest figures without any extra effort.

Figure 4

Select a workbook report to display in Excel click here for a larger version of this image

Figure 5

Sample report output click here for a larger version of this image

Tip 4. Offer support during the transition period. People also resist change, in part because of the cost of learning to use the new system. Providing support during the transition from the old system to the new system reduces transition costs. A common support mechanism is the “super user,” a department member thoroughly trained in the new system and accessible to help others when needed.

Another support device is training scripts that individual users can execute. SAP Tutor, an e-learning tool, builds annotated refresher scripts and training scripts for different system processes. With scripts, the cost of using temporary employees to perform supplemental data entry tasks can be borne by the project budget rather than individual departmental budgets.

Suppose you implement opportunity management to integrate a custom, standalone opportunity tracking system into mySAP CRM so that you can convert an opportunity to a sales order and improve how you measure successful sales cycles. You analyze the effort required to build a conversion program to load the legacy data results and decide to manually transfer the data from one system to the other. The training script for creating an opportunity is a step-by-step explanation of the process. You can use an output report from the legacy system in conjunction with the training script as the template to enter the data into the new system.

A word of caution with regard to providing transitional support — as long as the project is paying for the support resources, managers of the user departments have little incentive to insist that their staff accept ownership of the new system. Consequently, transition support must have a termination date, after which your company’s normal support procedures to handle subsequent support requests (along with the normal cross-departmental charges) are followed.

Tip 5. Provide incentives for system adoption. Develop a certification program that indicates an individual has successfully demonstrated a certain level of system knowledge. Then use certification as a compensation criterion and incorporate certification into job descriptions.

For a contact management implementation, typical skills include business partner master data maintenance as well as activity creation and maintenance. Since salespeople normally call on customers prior to their first order, they should enter prospects into the system so that activities can be appropriately assigned. With the first order, you can easily convert the prospect into a customer. One performance measure, therefore, might be the time it takes to enter the first order to track entry delays due to missing master data records.

Provide milestone rewards at appropriate points after go-live and rollout. For example, have a departmental party when a certain percentage becomes certified in the basic job skills. Finally, do not accept information delivered via old methods whenever the new system offers a new way to convey the information.

Michael Debevec

Michael Debevec is president of Debevec Consulting, Inc., and is a senior consultant with more than 14 years of experience with SAP. He has worked with SAP CRM for the past nine years and assisted in implementations in the high tech, consumer products, and pharmaceuticals industries. Prior to working in SAP, Michael was an IS manager in charge of logistics systems.

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