Introduction
While most of the departments in an enterprise are concerned with growing the business, the main duty of the risk and compliance department is to ensure that the company follows all necessary rules and regulations in place for all businesses and organizations to operate peacefully without infringing any rights. While it may seem like a straightforward task to follow a few laws, in reality, the compliance landscape is far more convoluted.
A seemingly harmless transaction could be endangering someone’s data, or a simple transaction could be violating an agreement. It can be especially difficult to navigate these laws and policies in ERP, which deals with a lot of interconnected entities and processes, each governed by different rules. You must have a stringent system in place, with either compliance software, teams, or a combination of both, within your organization or delegated to a third party.
This, however, is not sufficient; you must cultivate a culture of ethics and compliance to keep your organization and your workforce safe from violations. This can only be accomplished with regular compliance training and assessment of your employees. The compliance training should not only be frequently updated to stay abreast of the latest changes but should also be tailored to industry and employee requirements. In fact, according to the Gartner 2024 Legal and Compliance Executive Priorities Poll, 30% of Legal, Compliance, and Privacy leaders believe that designing or updating compliance training to make it more tailored to employee needs should be one of the top five priorities of businesses, with 6% believing it should be the top one.
While it is a highly recommended action, it is not necessarily easy, especially in regulated industries like finance, medical services, energy, education, legal services, etc. Imagine how complicated it must be to manage compliance in the ERP area of these sectors, more so if they use SAP, a platform known for its steep learning curve. However, Assima can make it easy for you to provide SAP ERP compliance training, with our innovative learning technologies that enhance engagement and retention to a great degree.
Here are some ways Assima fares better than traditional SAP training methods.
Understanding SAP Compliance in Regulated Industries
Non-compliance is a serious matter; it not only causes inconvenience for your business operations but can straight up bring legal trouble. Some of the repercussions of compliance law and not conforming to them are:
- Loss of reputation and trust with all stakeholders
- Legal action, fines, and even imprisonment
- Loss of licenses essential for operation
- Disruption of business operations at various levels
- Payment of damages to the injured party
- Damage to the reputation of the business
- Loss of talent from the workforce and potential recruits
- Withdrawal of investment and related losses
- Steep increase in insurance costs
- Impact on market reach and supply chain
Key Regulations Impacting SAP-Driven Industries
Now, compliance regulations in SAP can be tough to follow. This is true especially if you operate in more than one regulatory region, since every country and even state can have their own regulations which must be added accordingly to the platform. Compliance laws also differ from industry to industry. Moreover, some industries are regulated, meaning they have special compliance requirements since the impact of non-compliance is much more serious for these sectors than others. Hence, ERP compliance for regulated industries requires special training.
When setting up SAP or providing SAP ERP compliance training, keep in mind the following regulations for every SAP-driven industry:
Types of Compliance
- Universal (for all industries) – financial reporting, tax compliance, cybersecurity, data protection, operational governance and best practices
- Industry-specific – Medical/pharmaceutical, financial (banking, insurance, stock trading, etc.), retail, manufacturing, energy, communications
Global
- PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) – Financial data protection (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, and the Japan Credit Bureau)
- IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) or IAS (International Accounting Standards) – Financial reporting and accounting standards
USA and Americas
- HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) – Healthcare data protection (USA)
- SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley Act) – Corporate governance (USA)
- Dodd-Frank Act – Financial institutions governance (USA)
- CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) – Data privacy (California)
- PIPEDA (Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act) – Personal data protection (Canada)
- LGPD (General Personal Data Protection Law) – Data protection (Brazil)
UK
- UK Data Protection Act – Personal data protection
- FCA (Financial Conduct Authority) – Financial institutions governance
EU
- GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) – Personal data protection
- MiFID (Markets in Financial Instruments Directive) II and PSD2 (Payment Services Directive) – Financial services regulations
Asia-Pacific
- PIPL (Cybersecurity Law and Personal Information Protection Law) – Data privacy and security (China)
- PIPA (Personal Information Protection Act) – Personal data protection (Japan)
- APRA (Australian Prudential Regulation Authority) – Financial institutions governance (Australia)
- Privacy Act – Data protection (Australia)
Middle East
- DIFC (Dubai International Financial Centre) and the ADGM (Abu Dhabi Global Market) – Data protection (UAE – Dubai and Abu Dhabi respectively)
- HDPR (Health Data Protection Regulation) – Healthcare data protection (Dubai)
- PDPL (Personal Data Protection Law) – Data protection (Saudi Arabia)
- Basic Law of Governance – Corporate governance (Saudi Arabia)
- PDPPL (Personal Data Privacy Protection Law) – Data protection (Qatar)
Africa
- POPIA (Protection of Personal Information Act) – Data protection (South Africa)
Common SAP Challenges in Compliance-Driven Sectors
SAP training in itself is difficult and fraught with challenges. SAP user compliance training and regulations enforcement in SAP can become even more complicated quite quickly, especially if the regulatory requirements of the regions of operation, industry, scope of impact, etc. are not clearly defined. The following hurdles are quite common in SAP ERP compliance training and implementation journeys:
Difficulty in Keeping Training Content Updated
Compliance regulations are modified and updated frequently. Often, new frameworks and conventions are concluded that require a complete overhaul of the compliance configuration for your company. Updating compliance training in time for the enforcement of the new regulations can be difficult; it consumes a lot of time and effort and requires substantial manpower.
Lack of Employee Engagement in Compliance Training
If there is one part of regular training that most employees, if not all, will unanimously agree is the most boring and monotonous, it is compliance training. It is even more so for SAP ERP compliance training due to the already steep learning curve for SAP. Ensuring employee engagement for SAP user compliance training thus becomes nearly impossible without special training tactics.
Tracking and Reporting Challenges for Audits
Reports and audits are a compulsory part of compliance enforcement to show that you are following the necessary rules and regulations. However, unless compliance rules and policies are clearly defined and automated within SAP, it is impossible to reliably track and report the huge volume of information necessary for audits, creating a complicated situation to navigate.
High Costs of Non-Compliance Penalties
We have already discussed the implications of non-compliance, and none of them are scenarios any organization wants to be involved in. However, the very possibility of these situations creates fear among SAP users. This can lead to an extreme distrust in the SAP platform, discouraging usage, or nervous usage leading to errors and inaccuracies.
Complexity of Enforcing Compliance Rules Within SAP
SAP is known for having a feature-heavy user interface that requires intensive training and practice to master. As such, it can be quite a task to add complicated compliance rules and policies accurately to the platform. Even a small error can have serious consequences that can do intense, even irreparable damage to the company.
Explore the general challenges of SAP training and how you can overcome them.
Key SAP Compliance Training Requirements for Regulated Industries
Regulated industry SAP training for compliance needs to have certain characteristics to tackle the challenges we discussed earlier. Here are a few training program features that can prove to be a godsend for SAP ERP compliance training:
Role-Based Training for Compliance Needs
Compliance rules are different not just for different regions and industries but also for different departments and roles within an organization. Your training solution must have the required configurability to customize compliance education based on roles and responsibilities.
Real-Time Guidance for Compliance-Related SAP Features
Despite rigorous training and practice, it is entirely possible to forget or confuse certain laws and regulations. Instead of relying on uncertain guesswork, it is a much safer option to provide users with some form of real-time guidance tool that will point them in the right direction.
Standardized Global Training with Localization Features
If your enterprise operates or maintains a workforce in multiple locations across the world, make sure you can scale your training to a standardized global system. However, it should also have the ability to take local compliance requirements into account and adjust training accordingly.
SAP Training Updates Synced with Compliance Enforcement
Since compliance updates are frequent, your training system should be capable of quick updates or synced changes parallel to your SAP compliance solutions. This ensures that your employees do not fall behind in their compliance training due to deficiencies in your training program.
Best Practices for SAP ERP Compliance Training
Providing SAP ERP compliance training that meets the standards set by your industry, the expectations communicated by your organization, and the preferences expressed by your colleagues can be a challenge. Here’s is how you can fulfill them all:
Implementing Interactive Training Methods
Interactive training is the key to eliciting engagement in SAP compliance training. By engaging learners in a multi-way communicative training environment, you stimulate them to understand, analyze, and apply the information they learn in a constructive manner.
Ensuring Real-Time Guidance for SAP Users
The best way to garner confidence among SAP users who have graduated from compliance training and are deemed ready to use the live SAP system is to provide real-time informational support. This way, you can avoid errors as well as prevent user drop-off from fear.
Using Digital Adoption Solutions for Continuous Learning
Digital adoption for SAP compliance training is, by far, the best solution to promote continuous learning, which is necessary for constantly changing compliance requirements, especially in regulated industries. It automates and centralizes all training for convenience.
Automating Compliance Tracking and Reporting
Besides training delivery automation, tracking and reporting should also be automated to prevent wasting time, manpower, and resources in gathering, analyzing, and reporting results. Automated tracking and reporting capabilities will manage everything for you.
How Assima Enhances SAP ERP Compliance Training
Assima is not just optimized for general SAP training; it also has the right features and capabilities for SAP ERP compliance training. We discuss them below:
Interactive Learning Simulations for Compliance Scenarios
Assima Train uses a 4X patented cloning technology to help you author simulations of entire SAP processes, including compliance-based scenarios. These clones are hyper-realistic, allowing learners to use them interactively just like with the live system. They get to see the actions, reactions, and consequences of every action path in real time without risking the live system.
Real-Time Guidance to Reduce Human Errors
Assima In-App Search is an overlay search widget designed to provide real-time, dynamic informational support to users. These results are contextual and role-based, delivered on the basis of your designation and current task. This helps users get the confidence to work without fear on the live system while reducing the risk of mistakes that could impact operations.
Tracking and Analytics for Compliance Audits
Assima has an advanced analytics dashboard that reports learner progress down to a single click. It assembles information from complete learning journeys and integrates it into detailed reports. This helps you gain 360° visibility into the progress and areas of improvement of your training program as well as that of every learner in the program.
Scalable Training for Multinational Organizations
Multilingual options, data anonymization, dataset multiplication, easy lesson editing and customization, and remote capabilities are some features that make it possible for you to scale SAP ERP compliance training with ease when using Assima. You no longer have to manually do the above actions from scratch, saving time and energy.
What makes Assima the ideal training solution for SAP compliance?
Measuring Training Effectiveness for Compliance
Digital adoption for SAP compliance can only be successful if you have the tools to define and measure success. Training analytics does just that for you.
KPIs to Track for SAP Training
When providing SAP ERP compliance training, you have to assess both user performance and content reception metrics. That way, you can improve the lessons where necessary while also guiding learners in the right direction. Some of the primary metrics to be evaluated include:
- Learner Performance – Course attendance rate, completion rate, pass rate, drop-off/fail rate, average time to completion, assessment scores, etc.
- Training Effectiveness – ROI, post-training performance and SAP usage metrics, training return and continuation rate, etc.
- Content Reception – Best and worst performing lessons, content accessibility, NPS, etc.
However, these are very general metrics. You will have to consider the requirements of your organization and workforce, the nature of the training program, the goals and objectives of the training plan, and other impacting factors when choosing KPIs that will accurately reflect the results of your SAP user compliance training program.
The Need for Data Analytics in SAP Compliance Training
You might be wondering why we are putting so much more stress on data analytics for SAP training than other systems training projects. The reasons are:
- The complexity of the SAP UI results in a steep learning curve and difficulty in measuring training results. In-depth analytics helps in understanding the true state of the training program.
- The vast amount of knowledge required for SAP usage warrants the need to track results for every part of the curriculum as the average results for the entire content do not paint an accurate picture of all areas.
- SAP requires continuous learning and refresher courses to cover every part of the relevant knowledge base and stay ahead of updates. Without analytics, you will lose track of the progress of a learner, resulting in a section being missed or repeated unnecessarily.
- You can gain secondary information by extracting data and processing and analyzing it, which gives you more insights on how to improve the learning experience of your workforce going forward or give a struggling learner some much-needed push.
- The successful completion of compliance training is mandatory to continue employment or access certain parts of the live system. Analytics lets you keep track of which employees have finished or need to finish certain lessons for security and access.
- Reporting is a big part of compliance and by extension, compliance training. By maintaining a repository of data obtained through data analytics, you will have all the documentation necessary for auditing and reporting at hand whenever you need it.
Future Trends in SAP ERP Compliance Training
Compliance training is getting more and more advanced to prepare for a digitally transformed future. Here are a few trends that you need to keep in mind when providing SAP ERP compliance training:
Intelligent Compliance Monitoring
Compliance monitoring entails analyzing user actions against compliance rules, gathering documentation, and processing them into actionable information. Manual monitoring is no longer considered feasible or reliable. Algorithms that are taught to assess compliance adherence can now gather and report all the necessary information for you.
Personalized Learning for Different Compliance Roles
As we explained before, compliance rules are different for different roles, so training must be tailored accordingly too. Compliance training earlier used to be one-size-fits-all but enterprises are fast realizing the folly in this approach and switching to a role-based, personalized training method that caters to individual training requirements.
Cloud-based Compliance Training Solutions
When you train a global workforce, it is easier to maintain a centralized repository of compliance training materials. That way, you can easily update, modify, and customize lessons in the same place and deliver them to all learners automatically. Moreover, cloud-based solutions require less infrastructure, making it a more economical option.
Virtual Training Environments for Risk-Free Training
Virtual environments impart a lot of advantages for SAP compliance training. It is risk-free, allows ample opportunity for practice, and can be used freely without any impact on live data. Virtual training methods like sandboxes have been used traditionally but they are not feasible anymore. Simulations are fast taking over the training scene nowadays.
Conclusion
SAP ERP compliance training needs to be continuous, updated, engaging, and universal; otherwise, it will not be effective. Assima has all the features you need to ensure that the SAP compliance training for your organization is working as it should be. This is especially important for regulated industries, where compliance is a significant part of all operations, especially enterprise resource planning. Establish best practices for the SAP user compliance training of your company too, only with Assima.
Discover more about what Assima can do for SAP compliance training at your enterprise.
Frequently Asked Questions
Let’s Answer Some of Your Questions.
A regulated industry is one that is regulated under specialized government laws due to the nature and impact of their products or services on people and nature. These regulations can be levied on any part of their operational processes like pricing, profit, production, distribution, marketing, etc.
The main compliance requirements for SAP ERP in regulated industries are data protection and cybersecurity, financial governance, operational regulations, and licensing laws.
SAP is an ERP solution that can be used to handle a majority of business operations. Training in SAP compliance will thus help you learn about compliance requirements for most operational processes and help you work in line with regulations.
Common SAP compliance training challenges faced by enterprises include keeping training materials up-to-date, enforcing policies correctly based on compliance requirements within SAP, difficulty in tracking and reporting, penalties for non-compliance, and user engagement.
Assima Train has a range of features that are geared towards overcoming SAP compliance training hurdles. Its 4X patented simulation authoring technology allows the creation of hyper-realistic simulations for hands-on, interactive training that encourages engagement. You can teach users using real compliance scenarios without any risks to the live system. These simulations can be easily updated and modified, translated into all commonly used languages, and cleansed of protected data, allowing you to keep training up-to-date and scale it easily.
SAP compliance training, without a doubt, comes with major challenges. Some can be resolved by applying industry best practices while the rest can be handled by technology. Digital adoption automates many compliance training-related processes and makes them faster, easier, and more accurate.
Some proven best practices for SAP compliance training include using hands-on learning methods, automating analytics, and utilizing learning technologies.
You can measure the SAP compliance training effectiveness of your business by tracking KPIs like training completion rate, learner satisfaction, time to completion, evaluation scores, ROI, post-training employee performance improvement, etc.
Some examples of regulated industries where SAP compliance is important are medical products and services, financial organizations, manufacturing, chemicals, generation of certain energy types, etc.
SAP compliance training in the future will use more intelligent automation tools, virtual training environments, centrally synced systems, and global training approaches, among others.