5 blocking points in your training strategy 👇
95% of Purchasing Departments agreed that digital tools are going to be much more present and important in the daily lives of buyers (ADRA).
As the use of digital tools has increased significantly in recent years especially to preserve business during the COVID-19 crisis, mastering digital tools is therefore the 4th most important skill for buyers (ADRA).
However, despite their importance, tools such as ERPs are still not properly adopted.
This inadequate adoption has an impact on data quality for the Finance function, which is also an ERP user and driver.
Indeed, 76% of data quality problems originate in user input (The Warehousing Institute).
Nevertheless, the Finance Function has a duty to be a pioneer and an uncontested leader in the company’s digital transformation, to ensure its control and performance.
Training, a pillar for the adoption of your Finance or Purchasing IS, ensures good data entry practices and data quality.
But the reality is that training has now changed, and user support is overloaded with the same questions.
Let’s find out why the following 5 points require you to review your practices:
1. Varied populations
2. Occasional users
3. Tools that evolve more frequently
4. Extensive functional depth and subtle rules
5. A missing training plan
1: Varied populations 🧩
Your ERP user community will evolve throughout its life, to track changes in your business:
- Due to a frequent turn-over new populations need to be trained at each arrival
- New collaborators following a takeover/acquisition of another company who may not be familiar with the tool or your internal processes
- Because you will have opened up your processes to new user populations (for example: all employees can now submit a purchase request without going through their manager)
- Or to external users such as suppliers on their portal
Tip💡: ERP training must be planned for each newcomer, adapted to their profile and level of use of the tool: expert or occasional user. On-board micro-modules are an excellent compromise.
2: Occasional users 📍
Your finance employees, accountants and buyers aren’t the only collaborators who log on to the ERP.
Other users also come to carry out processes that they don’t do every day.
Let’s go back to the example of purchase requisitions: an HR manager to enter an order for a consultancy service, a marketing assistant for an order for goodies for an exhibition, …
Since their last connection, they have probably forgot how to use it, or they don’t know every subtlety.
When we know that 50% of the buyers still spend 20 to 40% of their time on the ordering process (Acxias), we can easily understand that it takes even longer for an occasional user.
Moreover, some processes are difficult to familiarise with because of their functional depth and the fact that they are rarely used, particularly by occasional or external users of the systems.
Tip 💡: Provide the ERP system with updated operating procedures for each process, adapted to the various possible contexts.
Users must be able to find them without having to search for them, otherwise they will prefer to ask the question directly for the umpteenth time…
These operating procedures should not look like 300-page user manuals that are impossible to navigate.
3: Tools that evolve more frequently 🆕
We need to communicate what’s new to ensure their adoption and business continuity.
However, from a triennial or annual editorial update rhythm, we have moved to a quarterly or half-yearly rhythm.
However, it is unthinkable today to schedule training sessions every six months for all employees in large organisations.
Furthermore, the modern learner only has a few minutes a day to learn. It must be up and running quickly.
Finally, emails of release notes detailing new features are usually not read, lost in the mass of emails received every day by an employee, and not perceived as “essential”.
Tip 💡: insert notification bubbles on the ERP screens affected by a new feature to inform the right users at the right time. Each bubble can either contain screenshots to introduce the new feature, or link to a more detailed intranet document, for example.
4: Extensive functional depth and subtle rules 🔎
Taking the example of the purchase requisition, how can we expect an occasional employee to know by heart the list of purchasing categories so that they can pick the right one, or to be aware of certain specific features depending on the type of purchase?
Tip 💡: clarify the meaning of fields, provide easy access to value lists and to tools that identify the right data to enter, specify the format of the data to be entered, etc.
5: A missing training plan 👨🏫
If training is the pillar of the adoption, how can we explain that 30% of companies don’t have a training plan (InsideBoard)?
ERP is not the most intuitive IS, and support must be continuous.
It must be noted that the source of the problem is not always linked to the applications, but to the absence of a change management plan from the origin of the project in 57% of companies, of training for 30%, or a mismatch between needs and the tools chosen (InsideBoard).
The rule is well known: without appropriate change management implemented upstream, projects will not be successful.
The Finance and Purchasing Functions agree on this point: according to 60% of Finance Directors, support for change is a key factor in the successful implementation of process digitization projects (Talentia et Markess).
41% of CFOs even consider that for the appropriation of technological solutions, it is crucial to provide real assistance to users.
3 main levers of appropriation according to these 2 functions are therefore:
– Setting up working groups to identify employees’ needs,
– Internal communication on the digital transformation plan/clear communication of the benefits to employees,
– Training in tools and processes.
Discover our White Paper on this topic:
“The Adoption of Finance & Purchasing ERPs”
Training doesn’t stop with roll-out, you must include the RUN phase in your change management and training plan.
Tip 💡: don’t forget training once you’re in the RUN phase! Training does not stop at deployment and should not be neglected. But it must be planned on an ongoing basis from the start of the ERP project.
To sum it up:
- If your users are regularly asking the same questions, it’s because the tool or the processes are not intuitive, and the answers are not easy to find: your users need to waste as little time as possible finding an answer that is adapted to their context.
- ERP and processes evolving rapidly, support systems must be adaptable and easily updated.
- User training must be addressed from the beginning of the project, and be thought through continuously.
Your adoption and training strategy on your ERP needs to be reconsidered.
Because the cascading effects of a wrong adoption of your ERP are multiple:
- Decline in its use
- Decline in user satisfaction
- Decline in its productivity
- Poor quality data
- Increase in the number of support tickets, …
The image of your Finance, Purchasing or IT function depends on well-trained employees to ensure good practices, data quality, talent retention and management of operating costs.
To fight against poor user adoption there are of course solutions and we have tried to provide you with some of them in this article.
👉 Most of the time, companies implement training and a user manual thinking that this will improve adoption. But is it really effective? This article will tell you more: 5 misconceptions about ERPs
👉 To go further into the solutions, discover our 10 secrets to ensure the adoption of your ERP: 10 Secrets to ensure the adoption of your ERP
