The Body Shop

The IT training consultancy Optimum has created a bespoke SAP S/4HANA retail end user training programme for The Body Shop, one of the world’s leading cosmetics brands.

During the first phase in 2019, the company is rolling out four SAP software workstreams, delivered via one unified user interface, to modernise the processes and tools that its planning and merchandising staff use globally.

The initial four workstreams – SAP Merchandising Planning for Retail, SAP Promotion Management for Retail, S/4HANA Product Management and S/4HANA Pricing Management – will be the foundation for further enhancements in later phases of the S/4HANA project rollout in 2020.

The company approached Optimum to design, develop and deliver the bespoke user training programme on the new software following a successful collaboration during its implementation of the SAP Hybris e-commerce system (now referred to as SAP Customer Experience).

Joanne Harrison, Optimum’s sales director, said: “The S/4HANA functionality was completely new to users and the implementation timescales were tight so they needed our expertise.” She added: “We provided an end-to-end service, from scoping the training requirement to creating and delivering bespoke classroom and online sessions, plus videos and reference guides, all within a few weeks.”

Optimum’s training consultants needed to be very flexible as they were developing and tailoring the training alongside the system build. Their hands-on approach drove the entire user training programme from the knowledge transfer stage, drilling down to get the detailed information they needed, to adapting the final content to reflect very late changes in the business processes.

Optimum’s brief was to develop and deliver job-specific training for all users within each workstream so that they understood how the business processes for their role had changed, as well as how to use the new system correctly.

Optimum developed animated introduction videos, using avatars and the voices of senior company directors, to highlight the benefits of the new S/4HANA retail system and gain user buy-in before the training took place.

As well as interactive eLearning modules, they also produced videos of the new business processes for each workstream, along with detailed reference guides for staff to use back at their desks. Classroom-based training sessions were held for the UK-based planning and merchandising teams before being delivered online via Skype and WebEx to users in various global locations.

Feedback from the training was overwhelmingly positive, highlighting that is was very tailored rather than generic and extremely user friendly.

In a separate project alongside the S/4HANA module rollouts, Optimum has also scoped and developed classroom-based training and reference guides for the company’s introduction of SAP Marketing Cloud, part of the SAP C/4HANA CRM system. This will interact with existing legacy systems, such as Hybris, to ensure customer data is up to date.