SAP Plant Maintenance Education

The first step to empowering an organization to achieve lofty goals is to empower them with the skills that will support success.  It is true that the business value for “Training” is not the training itself, it is the application of the skills learned in the training that justify the expense in time and money.

It is a core value of ours that the training we perform is the best we can do for the student, but in our years of training experience, we truly understand the partnership required between trainer, student, and leadership to realize the business value of the training expense.   There are few things as satisfying as having a craftsman or planner work hard to learn the SAP skills needed to effectively and efficiently contribute to the reliability improvement effort.  The sad reality in many cases is that the enthusiasm that is shared between the student and teacher is often severely diminished when faced with leadership that does not support the training effort with accountability to use and sharpen the skills learned in the training environment.  Skills development is a partnership that only begins in the classroom.

Here are the learning’s that we utilize in successful SAP PM organizations:

• There is a difference between teaching keystrokes and teaching how to participate in the reliability improvement effort.
  Many SAP Implementations approach training in a cookie cutter fashion by teaching only the keystrokes needed to get the information into SAP. It is not right to tell someone learning SAP “Don’t worry about that, it is not important to what you need to know”. It is important that we feed the desires of the floor personnel to become “business owners” now that they have the power of SAP at their fingertips. It is important to explain “why” this procedure is important and give them access to the value to justify their effort to learn and apply the skills.
• There is not a focus around roles and responsibilities, business process, or manual processes when training is delivered.
  Applying SAP to undefined business processes is like the human body without a skeleton. Defining roles and responsibilities, business process and manual processes has to be predefined in order to combine the theory for the importance of SAP to your role along with the practical application to meet the overall business model. SAP PM will utilize the business practices to optimize your way of achieving reliability success. SAP will not magically fix chaos.
• There is a Big Difference between knowing SAP PM and Teaching SAP PM.
  We have found that even though there are many people in the business world that understand SAP PM, even intricately, there are few that possess the skills necessary to effectively teach it, especially to a diverse population. They involve:
  • The skills to teach involves the people skills of understanding individual potential and addressing the needs separately until the team can be aligned at an effective skill level.
  • Meeting the students on their own terms. If they work night shift, teach them on night shift so that their routine allows for the best learning environment.
  • Often the teaching styles are not fashioned for the students learning style: visual versus auditory. Training manuals are not designed effectively in a step by step process to give the end user the ability to use at a later time or use as a reference.
  • The ability to keep the classroom active and the learning continuous even with varying skill levels.
  • The requirement that everyone in the training effort individually demonstrate the ability to apply what is learned in the classroom before leaving the classroom.
  • The ability to coach the leadership on how to maintain the momentum with metrics and follow-up on skills success and business value.

We pride our training as addressing all of these opportunities above and feel that with the true partnership we stress with the students and leadership, the value of the training expense will be realized many fold.

Visit our Solution Documents page for free articles on this topic
(you must be a registered user and logged in to download documents).