The purpose of this ticket is to render ourselves redundant.

Knowledge Induction

Two Cases – Any Familiar?

Knowledge Induction

A new in-house consultant, starting from zero.

A graduate or junior hire has just been placed as our in-house RE-FX consultant. The decision is made: this person will own the module. They bring intelligence, motivation, and a degree — but no operational experience, and possibly no SAP background beyond a course or two. The line organisation expects them to handle change requests within the first few months. Our senior people, if we have any, are too busy to coach systematically; informal mentoring happens in fragments between meetings.

From the outside, the situation looks manageable: a smart person, a working system, time to learn. In practice, the new consultant accumulates a backlog of half-understood configurations and silent gaps. They learn what to click, not why it works that way. The first audit, the first migration, the first edge case will expose what was never properly explained.

How structured coaching for a new in-house consultant works → (for registered users. If you are not registered yet, you can [register as an operator].)

A Knowledge Infusion programme runs as a sequence of individually booked sessions. Before each session, the trainee prepares one to three real problems from their current work — a change request, a configuration question, an unclear posting result. The session works through those problems live, in the system, using collaborative screen sharing. The reasoning is made explicit: not only what to do, but why the system behaves as it does. A written record of every learning outcome is delivered after the session and accumulates into the trainee’s own working reference over time.

Knowledge Induction

A lateral hire from another SAP module.

An experienced SAP consultant from another module — FI, CO, MM, perhaps SD — has been reassigned to RE-FX. They know how customising works, they understand transports, master data, and authorisation concepts; they are not a beginner. But RE-FX is structurally different: contract logic, condition types, periodic posting, IFRS 16 implications, settlement variants — concepts that do not map cleanly to anything in their previous module. From the line manager’s perspective, the move was rational: keep the SAP knowledge, learn the module on the job. In practice, the lateral hire has to figure out by themselves what is new, what is similar but different, and what is so different that their existing intuition leads them astray.

The pressure is different from the new hire’s: a lateral consultant is expected to look competent. Asking basic questions internally feels like exposing the gap. Result: silent guesses, defensive workarounds, and the slow accumulation of misconceptions that surface much later, often at cost.

How structured coaching for a lateral SAP consultant works → (for registered users. If you are not registered yet, you can [register as an operator].)

A Knowledge Infusion programme for a lateral hire is configured for the bridge — not basic SAP, not pure RE-FX from scratch, but the deltas. Each session takes a real problem from the trainee’s current work and treats it as the entry point into the RE-FX-specific logic underneath. The trainee compares what they would have done in their previous module with what RE-FX actually requires. The pace is faster than for a new hire; the depth, deeper. The format gives them a place to ask the questions they cannot ask internally without losing face.

Knowledge Induction

The product

Knowledge Induction

All of this is Knowledge Infusion. Building operational competence in a new in-house consultant is a process of structured exposure to real problems with someone explaining the reasoning behind each one. We do not teach SAP from scratch and we do not run a training course. We run iterative coaching sessions — one trainee, one moderator, one to three real problems per session — and we write down what is learned.

The method is set in advance; the configuration of each session is shaped by what the trainee brings into it.

Knowledge Induction

This is for you if…

A new in-house consultant has just joined our team, with little or no operational experience, and we cannot afford to have them learn entirely by trial and error. Informal mentoring is happening but not systematically; the gaps between what they have figured out and what they need to know are widening rather than closing.

We have moved an experienced SAP consultant from another module into RE-FX. They have the platform knowledge; what they lack is the module-specific reasoning. We need a structured way to close the delta without sending them on a generic training course that wastes the experience they already have.

We carry the consequence of the gap. The trainee will own real configuration decisions soon — change requests, periodic runs, migration steps — and the cost of misunderstanding compounds fast. We want the early errors to happen in a coaching session, not in production.

The trainee is willing to engage actively. Knowledge Infusion is not a passive course. It works for people who will prepare topics, work through them, and let their reasoning be examined. It does not work for people who expect to be lectured to.

Knowledge Induction

Prerequisite: the trainee prepares one to three topics from their real work for each session. Without preparation, the format collapses into ad-hoc questioning, which is a different and less effective engagement than what Knowledge Infusion is designed to deliver.