Case Study

SAP’s go-to-market execution depended on reps finding current messaging, collateral, and templates on the intranet. The homegrown CMS was slow and hard to use, resulting in outdated content. Distributed publishing across business units produced inconsistent naming, metadata, and quality that undermined usability. Centralization was the fix.

See also: the Intranet Migration & Launch case study.

Company & Position

SAP, Global Director, Global Business Operations (2006-2009)

Details

The solution was operational and organizational. We established a small, dedicated team of interns and recent graduates trained on SOPs, templates, and content calendars developed in collaboration with global and regional Marketing. The Americas served as the proof of concept. Once stable, standardized processes were transitioned to an existing SAP India team, augmented and trained. By 2009, scope had expanded to all Board areas globally — publishing, web production, content curation, communities management, light multimedia, and back office technical support.

Actions

• Built the business case for centralized publishing; hired and trained a founding team of interns and recent graduates.
• Developed content production calendars, templates, and SOPs in collaboration with global and regional Marketing.
• Transitioned standardized processes to an existing India team, augmented and trained to reduce costs further.
• Assumed global responsibility for all portal-related services, scaling from the Americas proof of concept to an 85K-employee operation.

Outcome & Impact

• Team of ~20 full-time staff, contractors, and interns built across the U.S., Europe, and India.
• Operation scaled from a 10K-user Americas publishing service to the knowledge management infrastructure for all 85K SAP employees.
• Cost reduced approximately 3x per unit of work by replacing distributed senior-staff publishing with a centralized, lower-cost model.
• Senior operations and IT staff freed for strategic, higher-value work.