Editor's note: This article by Holly Simmons, Vice President of Marketing for Social Software at SAP, is reproduced from the Apr-May-Jun 2014 issue of SAPinsider (SAPinsiderOnline.com) with permission from its publisher, WIS Publishing. Read the entire special report on social collaboration at SAPinsiderOnline.com.
Only 9% of global companies over the last decade have been able to achieve sustained, profitable growth, indicating that it is more important than ever to understand how to differentiate your business.
Surprisingly, the key to differentiation is not to change your business model regularly or to take on more new initiatives — instead, the most successful companies build on a simple business core that takes advantage of repeatable approaches to ensure that they successfully deliver what they do well time and again.1
SAP Jam was designed with repeatability in mind. As the market-first solution that weaves social collaboration directly into your work via your applications, mobile devices, and business processes, SAP Jam enables rapid repeatability to help you drive closure and improve the bottom line. With its built-in work patterns based on how business leaders work, SAP Jam brings together what you need in a single place: people, data, documents, discussions, tools, and applications.2 With everything at hand, you have the power to begin work quickly, make decisions, and drive action.
Work Patterns Across the Business
SAP Jam can support any department across the organization. Whether you’re in sales, customer service, product development, or human resources (HR), you can collaborate with colleagues, partners, and customers.
In sales, for example, an account representative’s role involves various work patterns, including account management, relationship building, and closing deals. To successfully close a deal, account representatives often collaborate with their colleagues to be better informed. SAP Jam can help here: The opportunity deal room work pattern enables sales executives to engage sales teams with customer service, product development, or marketing to define sales strategies, discuss customer requirements, or finalize a sales proposal (see Figure 1).
In human resources, HR professionals can use SAP Jam to onboard new employees, for example (see Figure 2). In this scenario, the HR professional helps a new sales representative join a group in SAP Jam and collaborate across the business to have more access to the information and contacts the new rep needs to get started quickly.
Repeatable Does Not Equal Rigid
Over the past 40 years, SAP has had a great opportunity to interact with customers to understand how work gets done across many departments and industries. With SAP Jam, that experience is incorporated into the solution’s design, and customers from over 50 companies provide regular feedback into the design of every work pattern. While the concept of repeatability might seem rigid, it’s actually quite flexible, with SAP Jam delivering work patterns that can be customized further by the business person or even custom-developed by IT.
Figure 3 highlights a work pattern that helps field and customer service professionals swarm around specific customers’ issues to enable fast closure and improve customer satisfaction. While this work pattern is provided out of the box with SAP Jam, any business person can change the look and feel or capabilities, such as adding a timeline of key events, a question-and-answer section, or group tasks. If an organization has a specific methodology, it can custom-develop work patterns.
Achieve Sustained Success
Work patterns can help differentiate your business, aiding in the training and productivity of your users. SAP Jam’s rapid repeatability can ensure that your success is sustained over the long term.
For more information, visit www.sap.com/jam.
1. Chris Zook and James Allen, “Repeatability: Build Enduring Businesses for a World of Constant Change” (repeatability.com).
2. To learn more about work patterns in SAP Jam, see the article “Transform the Way People Work with Work Patterns from SAP: SAP Jam Delivers a Fast, Repeatable, Flex...” by Anthony Leaper in the January-March 2014 issue of SAPinsider (SAPinsiderOnline.com).
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