Digital transformation is a journey, not a destination. Your enterprise needs the right insights to drive a continuous process that can create positive user experiences and improved efficiencies before, during, and after the implementation of SAP S/4HANA.

According to a June 2019 Tricentis survey, migration to SAP S/4HANA is a top priority for most SAP customers. But 53% of companies intend to postpone this migration until 2025, according to another study by Rimini Street. This begs the question: why do so many businesses intend to delay migration until as late as possible, when the costs, challenges, and stakes are higher?

Enterprises fear that digitalization and migration will create costly challenges. But it doesn't need to be that way — user experience analytics can help you figure out where to start your digital transformation and provide great value throughout the process and post migration. Beginning in the planning phase, these analytics can identify where the biggest problems lie in your existing enterprise application implementation. From there, it can help you overcome challenges during deployment and mitigate risk during evaluation and maintenance.

Before migration: Plan around how your employees interact with applications

User experience analytics software focuses on your employees to reveal where they struggle the most. It helps you discover which processes are taking the longest to complete — and how much that costs you in revisions and wasted time.

You also gain insight into how implementing SAP S/4HANA — with its more intuitive user interface and streamlined workflows — will help you realize immediate savings by fixing the problems that you identified using user experience analytics.

During implementation: Realize process improvements and savings

How is all this possible? Through metrics and visually rich dashboards that measure user experience and efficiency in language you can understand. This gives you the information you need to consider how your people, processes, and bottom line are being impacted. Such empirical user behavior data informs the design thinking process when creating new business workflows, and quantifiable performance metrics mean that your decisions are based on more than just the opinions and impressions of some of your employees.

From there, you can strategically plan how to optimize your processes once you're running on SAP S/4HANA. For instance, you can make an informed decision to prioritize specific IT initiatives based on the true business impact of application quality and performance issues.

During this stage, user experience analytics continue to monitor employee behavior across your entire SAP solution landscape, including on-premise or cloud deployments, desktop and mobile, and all other applications. You gain insight into quality issues at the point of entry, thanks to real-time monitoring that alerts you when and where users encounter errors or workflow inefficiencies.

After deployment: Support success through evaluation and monitoring

A successful migration to SAP S/4HANA does not end after deployment. True success only comes with user adoption.

User experience analytics software will continue to measure user adoption and usage after migration to identify functionality gaps or training issues. Ongoing support identifies application improvement opportunities to deliver optimized processes. That means you continue to save time and money by fixing process issues before or shortly after they arise, so your employees spend less time performing inefficiently.

During this stage, user experience analytics help you:

■ Locate process bottlenecks more easily

■ Determine which applications are being used the most, and by whom

■ See whether employees are using new and efficient processes or reverting to their old ways of working

■ Validate new application or process designs early, before a production rollout

And ultimately, you know whether you've met your goals for implementation. User experience analytics quantify improvements by comparing before and after KPIs, enabling you to see whether your business is getting full value from your investment in SAP S/4HANA.