Key User

A Key User is a person in a defined organization who specializes in a software and is considered the primary contact for the software in that organization. The key user knows the work processes and requirements from his organization very well, because he is mainly working as a permanent employee in this organization and the key user role is an additional role for him. In practice, a key user is not considered to be working 100% of his time in the organization so that he can still fulfill his activities as a key user. A good rule of thumb is 80% activity in the organization and 20% as a key user. The work of the key user is essential to work in a solution-oriented way. To drive usage, he acts as a trainer, coach, multiplier, and ambassador, among other things. The key user reports to the local administrator and forwards issues – which he cannot solve – to him.

Local Administrator

A local administrator is the expert for a location and solves – as a kind of 2nd level support – all concerns of the key users. He organizes regular meetings with all key users – every 2 or 4 weeks should be norm – and discusses not only current issues, but also further development opportunities. In practice, the local administrator is organizationally located in the IT department. Whether this employee works full-time or not in this role depends on the size of the organizations under him. As a rule of thumb, an administrator for SAP Sales Cloud can handle between 100-200 users – as the concerns of these many users are filtered through the key user and brought to him. The global administrator and IT management should determine exactly which activities the local administrator should manage and which should be passed on to the global administrator.

Global Administrator

The global administrator is considered the central contact for the software throughout the entire company. He organizes regular meetings with the local administrators, develops the system, maintains contact with SAP or a consulting company and reports to management. In practice, global administrators have access to everything in that system. The global administrator is a permanent employee in the IT department. Depending on requirements, this person also covers programming or forwards it to an internal or external colleague.

Let’s come back to Headphones & Headsets Holding and how they could be organized. As you can see in the figure below the company decided to have one key user per sales group, which makes sense since each sales group can have different requirements to SAP Sales Cloud System. For each sales office you have one local Administrator who is catching up with the Key Users. Since the local administrator in HHH-America is responsible for three sales groups, he will be much busier with C4C tasks than the local administrator in HHH-Europe. The local administrators in turn report to the global administrator – who is located at the headquarter.