Offshore training by e-mail

By ADAM GIFFORD

THE Tourism Board is using a computer-based training system to teach staff in its far-flung offices how to use its SAP financial system.

Iris Christopher, the board's financial management information systems manager, says the STT (simulation training tool) allows her to quickly create a lesson based around a staff member's actual duties and then send it by e-mail. The program also generates tests for the staff member to complete so she can measure whether the lessons are effective.

The lessons are developed as modules, lasting three or four minutes for simple processes, to about 15 minutes to work through the module on planning.

Ms Christopher still likes to get staff members out of the office for a couple of days for intensive training on the modules, but finds they then use the courseware as a refresher or as a help system. "When you give them this material in little bites they retain. They also retain more when you design the training to meet their job needs" she says.

Ms Christopher says the software has dramatically reduced the time she needs to prepare course material, particularly because it can capture live SAP frames relevant to the job at hand. "I don't need to spend time refreshing databases. Because the users think they are in the live system, you don't have to give them documents to work on."

The user does not need to be plugged into an SAP system to take advantage of it - it can run on a stand-alone Windows PC or laptop.It also saves on travel to the nine offices around the world. "I have the office administrators in the UK and Germany take over the training there, so we don't need to bring in professional trainers."

Ms Christopher says that in the six months the STT system has been installed she has created lessons around the financials and project management modules of the SAP system, and is working on the administration modules.

"The next major task is creating lessons for the upgrade to 4.5b (the latest version of the software the board has bought). It's just a matter of saying `here's the differences' and capturing the new screens." She says in the past such an exercise would have involved creating new training manuals, a time-consuming job.

"Now you only need to create supplementary manuals."
The STT product is part of SAP's thrust to make its software more accessible and user-friendly.

Les Hayman, the New Zealander who is SAP Asia Pacific president, says he has given his engineers 90 days to turn a three-day, $1000 SAP introductory course into a web-based product for $29.95, "because it should be the price of a book."