If you were about to board an airplane and the pilot announced that they had never trained for take-off, chances are you would high-tail it out of there. If you met with a surgeon who was about to perform a complex and challenging surgery, and they confided in you that they just planned on ‘winging it,’ our guess is you would cancel that surgery and never go back. Training is a critical component of building trust and ensuring successful outcomes. With ERP implementation, the same is true. Training is an absolute necessity, or you are setting up your business, your employees, your processes, and your customers for failure.
Implementing ERP Training and Employee Adoption
It’s vital to prioritize ERP training and full-scale employee adoption right from the start. We recommend waiting to move forward with an ERP project until you know you have the resources for training and support at all levels of your business. Financial resources and time allocations for trainings are absolute necessities, but you also need to get buy-in from executives, management, and other leaders who set the tone for acceptance and adoption of your ERP across their teams. And if you’re unsure of how to know when the right time to move forward is or how to communicate the ERP benefits to gain that critical buy-in, a trusted ERP partner can help in guiding you through the process.
Once you have the buy-in you need, dedicate the necessary time to training. Resist a common trap of cramming training into the last few weeks or days right before your ERP is intended to go live. Your ERP training should take time, and it should include communicating a full understanding of your business processes, how the ERP will impact them, along with the actual technical use. This is not just about how the ERP system technically works, but how it affects employees, their jobs and functions, business procedures, and how people can and will accomplish tasks and objectives with the new system in place. Training needs to cover how new business processes compare to old ones and how the change will impact the company, departments, and individual staff.
As with all parts of your ERP implementation, training should follow a timeline that is clearly communicated to everyone involved. Make sure everyone is aware of the timeline and that there are no users or staff left behind in training to avoid running into challenges when you go live with your new system.
Full-Service ERP Implementation
One extremely simple way to ensure your ERP training and employee adoption runs smoothly is to invest in a full-service ERP implementation. This means that the same partner who is planning your ERP system implementation is the partner providing training. It’s beneficial for your business because your ERP partner will already have an understanding of your business challenges and processes, what is changing, and what users will need to know to achieve the best results.
Decision Resources, Inc. is pleased to offer full-service ERP implementations to our clients, from the consideration phase to training. Our experts are on standby to provide the information you need to lead and communicate a successful ERP implementation across your business. If you’re ready to take a step toward transforming your business with an ERP, contact us today for more information.
