Newsbyte: SAP Study: Social Collaboration Measurably Improves Business Value and Helps Recover Sunk Costs

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Jul 07, 2015, 07:00 ET

WALLDORF, Germany, July 7, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Companies may lose as much as US$30,000 per employee per year due to inefficiency, a new study commissioned by SAP SE (SAP NYSE) revealed today, but collaboration technology can enable workers to connect and share information in real-time, driving measurable business results to compensate for this loss. These results and opportunities to improve line of business-specific KPIs were found in an IDC-commissioned study* on the business value of social solutions. According to the research, workers are severely hampered by everyday tasks, including reading and responding to email and searching for and gathering information. This reflects a huge measurable cost in the inefficiencies of work. However, social collaboration tools like SAP® Jam™, a secure, cloud-based social software platform with more than 17.5 million subscribers, can help facilitate faster, more informed decisions and improve the quality of the work that is critical to business success.

"Organizations should look to provide seamless experiences to their users by deeply integrating collaborative applications within existing enterprise systems and processes," said Vanessa Thompson, research director, Enterprise Social Networks and Collaborative Technologies, IDC Research. "The ability to link employees, partners, suppliers and customers together in order to deliver right time information and context to interactions is at the epicenter of competitive differentiation."

Collaboration is especially important for the lines of business in an organization, which face unique challenges and have stringent KPIs to meet. As part of the study, qualitative research white papers were developed for several lines of business — sales, customer service, human resources and marketing — to summarize what is most important to each and how collaboration platforms like SAP Jam can help meet their KPIs. The study found social collaboration platforms can meet line-of-business challenges in the following ways:

For human resources, speed up employee onboarding by connecting new hires with recommendations for people, content and training, and deliver intelligent filtering of appropriate training and development information as well as detailed management of personnel information.
For customer service, facilitate an open and transparent dialogue with customers throughout the lifetime of their relationship with a company.
For marketing, connect marketing teams with data from business users, customers, partners or suppliers to help reduce marketing costs and increase response time.
For sales, connect internal teams from across the company, ensuring rapid resolution of issues to speed sales cycles and improve the quality of the customer interaction, all while reducing costs.

Because it is a collaborative platform that works across the business, SAP Jam can help to measurably drive real results, while supporting the work processes and applications with work patterns for each specific line of business.

"These last three years of fast growth and meaningful adoption of SAP Jam has proven without any doubt that building highly connected networks of employees, partners and customers can drive business performance," said Sameer Patel, senior vice president and general manager, Products and GTM Enterprise Collaboration and Social Software, SAP. "Executives at many of the world's leading organizations are now leveraging social collaboration technology to drive growth, improve customer satisfaction and reduce cost."

Read the IDC InfoBrief and view the infographic to learn more about the potential business benefits enabled by SAP Jam for organizations, and read specific reports for sales, customer service, human resources and marketing lines of business.

For more information, visit the SAP News Center. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews.

Media Contact:
Janice Tsoules, SAP, +1 (650) 223-4817, [email protected], EST

*Source: IDC InfoBrief, sponsored by SAP, Harness the Value of Collaboration, 2015
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SOURCE SAP SE