Smith+Nephew embraces digital adoption to simplify procurement processes, increase efficiency, and improve employee experience

As Smith+Nephew deployed SAP Ariba to its global workforce, the company knew it needed to ensure seamless adoption of the new system to mitigate any potential risk of delayed orders and maintain the company’s reputation with suppliers. But the change to a new system, combined with the complex and nuanced nature of procurement processes, introduced challenges for employees and support team members.

“Despite live training and educational articles and videos, we knew user satisfaction wasn’t where we wanted it to be and that employees needed more robust support and guidance,” said Jerome Peytavin, Global Business Services Procurement Knowledge SME at Smith+Nephew.

The company set out to find a scalable change management solution that would ease the transition to SAP Ariba, improve compliance, and ensure operational efficiency – while also minimizing demands for its support teams and enabling employees to self-serve.

“Our priority was to make it easy to work with the system and minimize errors that created extra work or delays, so employees could focus on their main tasks, not procurement issues. We set out to show users that we were here and to build solutions that would help them,” Jerome said.

Smith+Nephew implemented WalkMe to help users transition smoothly to SAP Ariba, building interactive guidance and enabling users to get up and running quickly, without requiring extensive training.

Once users were comfortable with the new procurement system, Smith+Nephew’s digital adoption strategy evolved to focus on process adoption and ongoing change management. For example, the team uses ShoutOuts and other WalkMe capabilities to promote educational sessions, new SAP Ariba features, changes in the procurement policy, reminders, and information about new buying channels. “We use WalkMe to raise awareness for required actions, like setting up a delegate approver before the holidays,” Jerome said. “This step is easily missed, which could lead to delays. Now, we can prevent this issue so nothing is disrupted.”

To continue optimizing operations, Smith+Nephew uses digital adoption content to proactively prevent errors and reduce customer support tickets. For instance, when order categories changed in SAP Ariba, users were still selecting the old item categories and triggering error messages. Instead of waiting for them to contact support, Jerome quickly created a SmartTip that automatically alerts the user about the error and shows them how to solve it. This small, yet powerful solution, prevented thousands of support tickets.

“My goal is to enable team members to complete procurement workflows quickly and lighten the workload for support agents so they can focus on other requests – which benefits the business as a whole,” Jerome said.

By relying on digital adoption technology, the company has enhanced the procurement process, driven compliance to policies, and enabled teams to make even better buying decisions. For example, when Smith+Nephew issued a new order compliance requirement, the team used ActionBot to create a branching questionnaire that makes the process seamless for users. Now, when users create relevant requisition requests, ActionBot asks a series of questions, tailored to the requestor and the dollar value of the request, and allows them to respond in natural language. WalkMe collects the answers, pastes them in the comments field of the requisition, and sends the user to the next step. A similar process was put in place for approvers, who answer a role-specific set of questions via ActionBot that guides them through approving the request.

“Using a combination of WalkMe features, including forms and ActionBot, I was able to overcome the initial difficulties that the project team was facing and to deliver a working solution on a very tight deadline. The feedback after User Acceptance Testing was very good, with testers highlighting the ease of use,” Jerome explained.

Using segmentation, Smith+Nephew also built WalkMe support for the procurement team, enabling them to quickly complete core administrative actions. Launchers visible only to the team act as shortcuts, such as going directly to a user’s profile – which saves countless clicks.

Looking beyond SAP Ariba, Smith+Nephew introduced WalkMe for Esker, an invoice management software, improving the efficiency for other members of the finance team. After understanding the team’s needs, Jerome created a series of digital adoption content that checks for essential fields left empty in the invoicing process. If they are, WalkMe prevents users from saving or submitting the invoice and directs them to complete the remaining fields. This simple solution meant team members can send invoices out quickly and avoid rework.

“In addition to end-user guidance, we use WalkMe to prevent mistakes that would result in system errors and manual re-work by using validation, hiding fields, or blocking some combinations of data,” Jerome said.

By using WalkMe to drive its change management and enablement strategy, Smith+Nephew decreased its users’ support needs, which means they spend less time seeking assistance, and the support team is free to concentrate on other requests. To illustrate, applying digital adoption for just one invoicing workflow led to a 70% decrease in errors, along with an estimated 2.5 hours saved per week in support hours. Additionally, since deploying WalkMe, user satisfaction with SAP Ariba has increased, exceeding the organization’s 80% target. Digital adoption has also improved the reputation of the procurement team – employees saw that the team understood their needs and took action to improve their experience.

WalkMe’s customizability and flexibility has been key. “Whether users want comprehensive, step-by-step guidance or simply to access tips for completing critical fields, WalkMe guides users without being intrusive or overwhelming them. Our solutions proactively prevent issues before they happen and provide the amount of support employees need, when they need it. We’ve saved a huge amount of time, cost, and effort because we can customize WalkMe to suit our needs,” Jerome said.

As Smith+Nephew’s approach has matured, the company continues to focus its digital adoption efforts on continuous improvement and do-it-for-me tools that ease frustration and save resources that can be allocated to other strategic tasks. “Our digital adoption strategy and the implementation of WalkMe content means our employees reduce the time they spend dealing with procurement-related tasks and focus on their core tasks – and I would like to add more segmentation to offer targeted content to users and use even more automation,” Jerome said.

Leaders from other business units within the company have seen the successes on the procurement team and are interested in applying WalkMe to their needs, which has led to increased interdepartmental collaboration. “People have started coming to me for ideas or solutions because they’re confident I can apply my knowledge of WalkMe to help them,” Jerome said.

WalkMe’s content and guidance support the company’s shift-left strategy by empowering users to solve issues independently. “Smith+Nephew’s core values are care, collaboration, and courage – with innovative digital adoption solutions, we offer additional layers of support to our colleagues that helps us uphold these values,” Jerome said.