Knoa Software has reflected on its continued success in 2020. The pandemic saw a significant shift in working practices across the world. Organisations evolved to work-from-home (WFH) organisations during lockdown. This meant an increased shift of cloud solutions and a lessening of visibility within the IT department. Customers turned to Knoa User Experience Management (UEM) Software to fill the knowledge gap for their SAP S/4HANA migration projects.
TGS turn to Knoa
TGS has used SAP solutions for years. During the pandemic, it adapted an extension of SAP SuccessFactors to help ensure both employees and managers’ safety. However, the change to remote working meant that TGS needed to create an environment where employees could work from home. To achieve this, it created virtual machines and enabled employees to connect to these to run their applications. However, such as rapid deployment meant the IT team was uncertain that the users’ experience was as good as possible.
TGS turned to Edison, a partner of both SAP and Knoa. SAP UEM, powered by Knoa helped to provide them with the insights they needed to tune the rapidly deployed architecture. The Knoa solution provides TGS with full visibility of how employees used the applications, highlighted issues, such as poor performance and then analysed the root cause of the issue so that the team could address them. This enables the employees to increase efficiency and trust in their solutions. TGS wanted to address five key questions:
- Is our user experience the same as before the lockdown?
- Was the SAP response time the same?
- Is user behaviours the same in lockdown?
- Are users making more errors, or do they need targeted training?
- How are users working from home?
Micaela Di Manzo, process consultant at Edison, commented: “Thanks to Knoa we are able to generate reports which allowed us to see the situation more clearly and help them.”
The Knoa solution helped identify that users’ activity and response times were generally unaffected by the lockdown. Di Manzo revealed that this was not the case with other customers where Knoa identified issues and Edison were able to help pinpoint and resolve them.
Not just TGS
Other organisations have faced similar challenges this year, and many still do. Knoa highlights three challenges that organisations face:
- Will the enterprise software function the same way when accessed remotely compared to being in the office?
- Would any issues related to compliance, security or confidentiality require changes to workflow, user interface, functionality, etc.?
- Can employees adjust to the ‘new normal’?
The Knoa UE solution has helped organisations overcome these challenges. Corrective actions highlighted by Knoa can include:
- technology upgrades
- workflow redesign
- error message resolution
- personalized training
- process changes
Knoa helps others and itself
In helping many organisations improve their SAP ERP solutions’ efficiency, Knoa has had a good 2020. Its software has proven especially effective, as architectures have been forced to change overnight to meet the pandemic’s new demands. As a result, Knoa had a good 2020 both in terms of increasing market share but also helping customers that have been key in fighting the pandemic including healthcare, pharma and utilities and distribution companies.
Knoa CEO Brian Berns commented: “2020 was a challenging year for everyone, but essential organizations and businesses had to continue operating. Most importantly, they had to make sure that their remote workers could perform effectively and stay engaged in a new and sometimes chaotic environment. We are very pleased that we were able to help so many companies overcome these unexpected obstacles.”
During the last few months, Knoa also extended its solution with the Knoa analytics platform. This provides users with a complete solution that helps them adopt cloud software faster. In October it also launched Knoa for SAP Cloud for Customer enabling customers using SAP cloud to benefit from its insights.
Berns added: “I am very proud of our organization, as Knoa employees were able to adapt to the challenging work environment and deliver new and exciting technology in 2020. We have very ambitious plans for 2021 both on the technology and business fronts.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
As companies continue to shift their architecture to better support remote users, understanding the impact on performance has never been more critical. It is not as easy for home workers to contact IT. Or even to share information with colleagues casually about poor performance anecdotally. With the Knoa solutions, IT organisations can perceive the shortcomings of software, processes, technology and networks. They can then work to resolve these issues to improve the user experience and their productivity.
While this appears to be a momentum release, there is a lack of actual numbers to see how Knoa has performed.
