SAP Enable Now Implementation – Application Configuration

Let’s build!

Software implementation is a serious business. This also applies to a learning platform like SAP Enable Now. Successfully implementing Enable Now requires the right people to be involved, strategic decisions to be taken and certain prerequisites to be met. My Enable Now implementation strategy consists of 7 steps, which I would like to explain in 7 blog posts. Written from a consultant’s perspective and based on my personal experience.

SAP Enable Now Implementation Approach

This posts focuses on Application Configuration. Based on the choices made in the Scoping workshop, Enable Now can be configured. Even if we stay close to the standard, certain things need to be set up in the system. Templates must be built to structure the content creation process. Recording and playback settings must be refined. Customer's corporate identity must be integrated. Maybe a workflow is needed to track the content creation process. And many more things.

Best Practices

The fact that certain things need to be configured doesn't mean we have to start from scratch. In my very first Enable Now project, I wasn’t familiar with the Enable Now Infocenter. Or maybe I should say I was aware of it, but I was eager enough to think that I knew better. Nowadays I consider myself more and more as a happy user of the Best Practices found in the Infocenter. One example is setting up a Workspace structure. It doesn’t take more than half an hour to do it. You just download a predefined structure from the Infocenter and upload it to your empty Workspace. Since the latest Enable Now release (2024-11) the structure is even generated automatically, when creating a new Workspace. Where necessary, we make some adjustments, and we are ready to run.

Another example is dealing with roles and permissions. I have to admit, not my favorite topic, but definitely an important one. I can start with a blank sheet and ask what a Standard Author is or is not allowed do in Enable Now, for which things you need Master Author authorization, and what is exclusively for an Administrator. But SAP has already done that for me. In 9 out of 10 cases, the standard roles work perfectly. Of course, if needed, we tailer the standard roles to the specific situation. The relatively new functionality of Business roles is such an example. Sometimes not all end-users are allowed to see all content. Think of sensitive information in the areas of HR and Finance. This can be perfectly solved with Business roles, which basically are derivative roles of the standard Learner role. Another example is that I once extended the standard Master Author role with rights to create and manage users. This customer didn’t want to bother the IT department with it,  but preferred to keep it within the HR department as owner of Enable Now. Of course Single Sign On would have been better, but that was not in scope.

Templates

What do simulations, books, book pages, and quizzes have in common? Well, they all use templates. Some nice examples can be downloaded from the Infocenter. Nice? Yes, indeed. But I’m not entirely satisfied with these. I think I can come up with much better templates myself. With a bit of fine-tuning to my self-defined templates, we make a quick start in your project. It’s also this template that I often use in the Introduction Workshop. So, for me this is a real kick starter. No offense, but truly much better than those I know from the Infocenter.

Some good pictures from customer’s image bank, the right fonts, and early involvement of the marketing department do the rest. That last aspect is something I never used to think about. Until a customer, more than a year after go-live of the first S/4HANA functionalities (with accompanying Enable Now content), explained me that bold or italic texts are not very readable for people with visual impairments. Thanks to the templates, we could correct this quite quickly, but I really would have preferred to know it earlier. The first impression of a learner is important, so since that very moment, I ensure that everything related to the look and feel of content is aligned upfront with the responsible department.

When you create a PowerPoint to convince people of your vision or story, you do not just focus on content, but also on presentation. At least I hope you do. In my opinion, this applies to training material as well. With good templates, authors don't have to worry about presentation and can focus on content. Nice side effect is that this also saves us quite some time in the author training.

Workflow

In my first Enable Now implementation, the team had to create about 300 Screen Simulations and almost 40 eLearnings. And as in any project we were dealing with very tight deadlines. The project included the development of an industry-specific template in S/4HANA and SAP Cloud for Customer. There were no key users, and most consultants prefer building a nice solution over creating training materials. So, resources were limited and deadlines were hard. I can't remember how we managed to get everything finished on time, but I do know that Excel played an important role. In a later project, for another customer, I set up a very specific folder structure in the Enable Now Workspace to track the status of each object. A solution that worked quite well due to the relatively small scope of that project, but less practical in the case of 350 objects to develop.

And all this while Enable Now has a functionality to set up our own workflow. We define the steps and transitions. Keep it simple and set-up something that suits your organization. It's definitely a good way to monitor progress and keep track of the steps and persons where the content creation and validation process delays. I admit that there is still room for improvement and that reports definitely can be better, but it's at least more efficient than making weekly phone calls to all authors and manually updating an Excel file to determine total progress.

Conclusion

I personally find configuring Enable Now one of the more enjoyable parts of the entire project. The Infocenter is there to help me. I do spend serious time setting up the right templates. That is how I protect my customer from the many pitfalls I once fell into myself. The best tip I can give is to have someone who knows the Enable Now application well and who can guide you based on this experience. After all, you do hire expertise when you're going to set up a financial or logistics process in S/4HANA. So why wouldn't you do the same for Enable Now?

Next Time

Now that we have set up the system so that the right content can be created and published in the right way, it's time to go back to the participants of the Scoping workshop. To validate whether it has become what we agreed upon there.

My next post will therefore focus on the Validation Workshop.

Let’s Enable!

Transform an SAP project into a success that goes beyond time and budget. Make your SAP solution is truly adopted by your people. Enable Now is SAP's platform to accelerate the development of training materials and support effective training and support of employees. A foundation for creating and optimizing learning content. Not only for SAP, but for other applications as well. The knowledge and experience of Let's Enable guarantee utilization of the full potential of Enable Now.