SAP Tutor upgrades 2 000 SABMiller employees on SAP in two months

Upgrading from version 4.5 to 4.7 of its SAP enterprise resource planning software, SABMiller - one of the world's largest brewers, with a brewing presence in 40 countries on four continents - used SAP Tutor to familiarise more than 2 000 South African employees with the system changes in as little as two months.

Says SABMiller upgrade project training manager, Sharon Jorgensen: "We had two-and-a-half months to develop and test 325 tutorials and then two months to implement them nationwide. We couldn't achieve those results in time using classroom training - quite apart from the enormous costs that we would have incurred in hiring venues, paying for employee accommodation and travel, man hours out of the office, and printing manuals.

"So, we went with e-learning using SAP Tutor, which SABMiller had acquired but not yet used extensively. In total, the solution enabled 21 853 lessons to be worked through in the two training months - ensuring everyone was fully equipped to use the new version of SAP by the time it went live.

"At the same time, it enabled us to develop in record time a reusable resource that can be referred to at any time by existing staff who need to refresh themselves on a given process or transaction and can also be used by all new staff who will need to be trained on SAP 4.7."

SAP education consultant, Gerrie Hadders, points out that creating tutorials in SAP Tutor takes half the time needed in other systems. "You can develop an entire lesson - from recording a transaction, editing it with company-specific details and authoring the necessary instructions and notes for users - in six to eight hours."

Jorgensen agrees that SAP Tutor is very easy for trainers to use as it comes standard with a tool that shows content developers in 30 minutes how to use the application. The SABMiller training department needed to resort to SAP for advice only a few times. "And, having direct access to a specialist at SAP in Germany, we could resolve queries very quickly."

An additional SAP Tutor advantage is its feedback facility, enabling trainees to send queries to trainees and get real-time responses. "One of the mistakes made with e-learning is abandoning trainees to the tender mercies of the electronic system and removing the warmth and support provided by human trainers," Jorgensen says. "SAP Tutor makes ongoing communication between trainer and trainee easy."

The feedback facility also reports on what lessons trainees are doing at a given time and how well they are doing with them - enabling trainers to refocus or refine training where necessary. It also enables human resources departments to track the organisation's skills base.

Jorgensen adds that although e-learning is essential in modern skills development, it requires organisations to adjust their approach to training. "Adults, as a rule, aren't used to learning through a machine, so you need to develop an e-learning culture in an organisation. Also, electronic training methodologies are different from those used in the classroom and so you need to acclimatise content authors and trainers to the e-learning environment - as we did with the nine external consultants we brought in to help us with the volume of work.

"In addition, you must set standards. Everyone developing content needs to know what the desired outcomes are and how they are to be achieved. In our case, we set objectives for each tutorial as well as involving technical and other staff in checking our material to ensure that it actually achieved not just the company's system needs but also it's strategic business needs."