One process. Two journeys.
Ashleigh HamblingAccount Executive, SerendataI was speaking with an implementation lead recently, about a global SAP transformation where procure-to-pay became a really good example of how different the journey to one standard process can be across the business.
On paper the to-be process looked sensible. And as is familiar to most people in the world of transformation the as-is states varied enormously across regions.
In one country the main change was around approval routes. Elsewhere, Finance had always carried out part of the P2P process for the business. For this region, moving to the new global process meant more responsibility shifting back to the business teams actually raising and approving spend, alongside entirely new system steps and letting go of ways of doing things that had existed for many, many years.
Both teams were on a journey to the same place, but how they got there, had to be very different. The amount of adoption risk varied, a lot, and if adoption risk wasn’t managed well, it would show up through slower approvals, more exceptions and local workarounds.
It’s crucial that adoption isn’t treated as a one point in time, check after go‑live ...
If different parts of the business are travelling different distances to get to the same future state, you need to be able to see how that journey is progressing over time.
- who is most engaged?
- where is confidence starting to dip?
- which audience groups are struggling to understand their new roles and responsibilities?
- where is readiness improving, and where has it stalled?
- who needs more support before go‑live?
- where should limited change resource be focused?
Tracking engagement and readiness over time becomes even more useful when you layer in the severity of change impact. A georgrapy that’s only changing a few approval steps won’t need the same level of intervention as the one that’s taking on entirely new responsibilities.
The next step for operational excellence is bringing process and change intelligence together. The readiness, engagement and impact data that’s tracked throughout implementation, gives important context to what shows up in process performance later.
If readiness is low in a particular audience, if resistance is growing, if several change impacts (from different programmes) are hitting an audience group at once, change intelligence can help to explain why a process isn’t landing in the business the way you want it to. And if processes don’t land, they become performance issues later on.
This level of insight gives OpEx leaders a much stronger basis for deciding where to intervene, where to focus implementation support and whether the issue is process design, adoption, or both.
I truly believe, this combination is the unlock to make well designed processes an operational reality, rather than being stored as pretty process documentation, never to be looked at again.