How one Microsoft ISV accelerated training and documentation

This article is sponsored by ClickLearn.

Training and documentation can be one of the greatest stumbling blocks for an ISV in its go-to market initiative. Microsoft MVP Rick McCutcheon recently hosted a webcast (available on-demand) with Daniel Garcia, VP of strategic alliances at ClickLearn and Signe Agerbo, product owner of Atradius Flow, exploring the ways that these two ISVs teamed up to overcome training and documentation challenges.

ISVs find that creating documentation incurs a range of costs on an organization. The work is time consuming, expensive, inefficient, and often additionally complicated because of the need to create language or region-specific localizations.

An international go-to-market challenge

Atradius, a global trade credit insurer, represented in 50 countries with 3,600 employees, encountered many of these problems in its go-to market for Atradius Flow, Agerbo told the audience. Atradius developed Atradius Flow as an extension in NAV and Business Central to connect its API services to manage credit, track deadlines, and spot changes. The program supports Dynamics NAV 2013 to 2018 and Dynamics 365 Business Central. The company launched the product in four European countries.

"Credit insurance plays a significant role in mitigating risks associated with international payments," she explained. "We insure against nonpayment due to insolvency, [so that customers can] expand activities with confidence. Credit insurance promotes economic stability reducing risks of cascading supply chain and insolvency.

Scaling product support responsibilities

But credit insurance is also notorious for being old fashioned, she said, which opens an opportunity for the company to get an edge on their competition. Agerbo told the panelists that as a product manager, she is responsible for continuing to deliver a high level of service. But as the product grew and gained more customers, the work required to support customers became too much for one person.

"Previously all onboarding was handled by myself, with first and second line user support, manuals, and documentation. [You might say we are] victims of success," she said. "I’m no longer able to manage all aspects of Flow. We needed to ensure internal processes are efficient and scalable, and to ensure users are continuously educated to use various tools inside Atradius Flow."

Embracing digital adoption

Launched in 2010, ClickLearn is a digital adoption solution that captures a work process in any business system and then automatically generates written step-by-step guides, videos for training, and a basis for deploying all of this training material in an HTML structure viewable in any device. The firm now supports over 9,000 documentation creators worldwide, Garcia said.

“Honestly, I’ve spent hours on end manually documenting workflows, only for it not to be used because it was out of date," recalled Agerbo. "We met ClickDimensions in Milan, and we knew this was a perfect solution for Atradius for educating our sales staff, supporting internal units, training local superusers, and updating training material for colleagues and customers.

"With the ClickLearn tool, all I do is capture all the different functions in our product. I can tell you quite frankly, the last manual I did took eight months to do and was never released because it was outdated. But it took me about 3 minutes with the last update with ClickLearn."

A plan for further scaling

When it comes to onboarding, ISVs can find that product owners, consultants, and other skilled staff become unofficial onboarding and training specialists, losing focus on their areas of expertise. Moreover, ISVs need to release new updates regularly to stay competitive and keep up with changes made by Microsoft. Migrating from a system like Dynamics NAV to Dynamics 365 Business Central means creating even more documentation for different processes.

“These are very tangible examples of how ISVs are using ClickLearn," Garcia added. "[We] are able to meet the challenges of product owners, address documentation, localization of languages, and selling to stakeholders, as well as staying on top of all of your release timelines. If you are struggling to do things manually the old fashioned way and trying to facilitate the whole thing, it might be a good time to revise what mechanisms you are using to live up to those challenges.”