At the crossroads of internal and external corporate relationships, the Finance and Purchasing Functions are at the heart of the stakes surrounding digitisation, and naturally follow its evolution.
The deployment of their information systems must therefore be secured to facilitate this strengthened collaboration between business.
In this way, 65% of purchasing department digitalization projects are considered critical or strategic for their companies.
The Finance Function is not to be outdone since, thanks to the time saved by using digital tools for producing and consolidating data, the role of finance employees is changing dramatically. Their missions are more focused on higher added-value tasks such as strategic consulting.
Thus, just like Purchasing, 25% of CFOs are becoming digital transformation leaders thanks to their position at the crossroads of business functions (Organisation Performante).
The foundation of this digital transformation is the ERP.
The adoption of an ERP from the beginning is therefore crucial.
Good practice must be developed from the beginning to ensure: the quality of your data, the correct use of your tools and processes, the performance of your employees.
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, …
To find out more about the reasons about poor ERP adoption, we’ll let you read this article first and then come back to this one. 😉
Now, let’s have a look at 10 good practices to help you appropriate your ERP:
- Have project sponsors and key users
- Communicate about changes as early as possible
- Use integrated training methods
- Train about your internal processes
- Consider occasional and/or external users
- Assist with process changes
- Give reminders
- Analyse the use of your tool
- Get feedback
- Consider continuous improvement
1: Have project sponsors and key users 🔑
More in-depth than communication and training tools, supporting change mobilises key players. These key players are called to adopt the posture of agents of change. From management to end users, through key-users: to ensure the success of a project, everyone needs to participate.
65% of the digitization projects of the Purchasing Department are considered critical or strategic for their companies.
They are so important that in more than half, the CEO or General Management are involved (ADRA, Médiation des Entreprises and BuyYourWay).
A Finance project without sponsorship from General Management will have difficulty extending beyond the limit of the Finance function. In the same way, a Purchasing project that has no local support will undoubtedly have problems being adopted.
The support and involvement of General Management in driving the deployment of the digital strategy to all the company’s stakeholders is a key factor in the success of the implementation of projects to digitize financial processes for 70% of CFOs (Talentia et Markess, Digitalisation des processus financiers – Approches & besoins à fin 2022, 2022).
The project must therefore first be supported by the GM, who understands the added value, and then by ERP managers and key users, who act as relays for good practices.
The « key » users are aptly named: they are “key” to the transmission of knowledge and good practices, influencing the adoption of their peers.
All these key players can be grouped together under the term “ambassadors”: they will represent the project and act as an excellent link between employees and the people implementing the solutions.
💡 Solution: Identify and engage the right ambassadors. They have a role of referents, spread the good word, and provide a reassuring ear to answer any questions and remove any reluctance to adopt the new tool.
As for General Management, a good preparation upstream of the project’s presentation (objectives, monitored indicators, ROI, change management plan, etc.) is necessary to convince them of the added value of such a project.
2: Communicate about changes as soon as possible 📢
We often wait until the final training sessions to communicate about changes. But it’s upstream that all the stakeholders need to be informed.
Internal communication on the digital transformation plan is a key driver of digital engagement for 40.5% of Purchasing Departments (CNA, ADRA, InsideBoard)
If you want to make sure that your tool is used properly, it is essential to communicate about it at every step of your project:
- Before its deployment to inform employees of the upcoming changes and their interest, distribute clear explanations of the benefits to employees and remove as many worries and obstacles as possible
- during the roll-out to encourage people to go and promote good practice,
- after to keep users informed of what’s new, and to maintain the skills of old and new users alike.
💡 Solution: Organise workshops with representative stakeholders ahead of change. Develop an appropriate communication plan and share a provisional timetable for the changes to come with all your employees.
Reassure them and encourage their interest by communicating through teaser videos or webinars presenting the new features and the support you have created to help them. Once the tool is in place, use innovative solutions such as Shortways to communicate directly on the right screens within the tool: a step-by-step guide to introduce the home screen, a notification bubble to inform users of a change in the regulations, of an unavailable screen, …
3: Use integrated training methods 👩🏫
Although “traditional” training methods (face-to-face training, distance learning, user manuals, …) have proved their worth, they can quickly become obsolete and unsuitable for the implementation of your digital tools.
Needs have evolved in recent years, and the modern learner now only has a few minutes a day to train.
It is difficult for him to attend long training sessions from which he will remember almost nothing …
He prefers to follow integrated micro-training modules when using the tool: this is Josh Bersin’ famous « flow of work ».
Indeed, users forget 80% of what they learned in training after 1 week. And that’s normal! The human brain can’t retain everything, especially when the training does not include any practical use of the tool, and when this practical use is not “trained” over time. It’s Hermann Ebbinghaus’ famous « forgetting curve »:
There are sometimes user manuals, but they are not consulted because they are too long, not updated, not adapted to the context or to the need for immediacy, …
🔎 Zoom on: 5 misconceptions about ERP
The way ERP systems are used needs to be redesigned.
On-board support solutions on tools exist to guide users across screens, such as digital adoption platforms.
💡 Solution: Shortways Assistant
If 80% of information is lost over time when the brain does not try to maintain it, or because the information is meaningless for the learner, the solution is obvious: Shortways Assistant displays contextualised help directly from the right screens for your users according to their profiles.
As administrators, you can also push full-page messages to: remind of a deadline, give a reminder about a process, welcome a new supplier when they log on to your portal for the first time,…
👉 Engage and support your users in the right place at the right time! This article will tell you more about it.
4: Train about your internal processes⚙️
As well as the tool itself, it’s your internal practices that users need to adopt.
Your internal processes have their own specific features that need to be taken into consideration.
Preparing a training plan is fundamental to make sure people take full advantage of the tools, because ERPs are not the most intuitive applications. It is important to guarantee that all employees can carry out the processes easily, whatever their level of maturity with digital tools.
💡 Solution: The secret is to guide users through the processes and not just the tool. Shortways’ step-by-steps are there to help users familiarise themselves with their tool, and guide them through the process screen by screen. Contextual help can be used to define value fields and warn of certain subtleties.
Make sure that your help content is as understandable and explicit as possible. Do not hesitate to call on newcomers to test the tool before deploying it, and detect grey areas that need the most support.
5: Consider occasional and/or external users 📍
Some processes are difficult to get to grips with, particularly for occasional or external users of the systems, due to their functional depth and the rarity of their use.
It’s easy to understand that an employee who comes to make a purchase request once a year has surely forgotten the process in the meantime, when the process itself have probably changed since the last time.
It is normal that the level of knowledge of the tool and its processes varies from one user to another in the company. Depending on their role, frequency of use, interest in digital technology, …
Don’t forget that external users such as suppliers also make entries and need to be a part of your training system! They sometimes have 1 different tool per customer to master: make life easier for them and avoid support and longer delays…
These users must not be left behind in your change management, as they will also enter data. It’s essential to ensure that they get to grips to secure data quality.
💡 Solution: Shortways adapts to these two profiles:
- There are notifications that are displayed automatically to alert occasional users. These notifications can be set to be displayed only a limited number of times for a practiced user, to avoid polluting them with information.
- For external users, take advantage of our « tags »: filter displayed content according to your users’ profiles. Thus, you will be able to create and broadcast content that is exclusive to your suppliers: run an automatic step-by-step presentation of the portal on their 1st connection, put the procedure for creating a user in the FAQ, a step-by-step guide to access their invoices, …
6: Assist with process changes 📅
To take the example of the purchase request process once again, it may change every year: new purchase categories, new mandatory field, …
And every year your employees are lost in your form because they are not aware of the changes, and nobody has taken the time to modify the user manual.
As a result: purchase categories are incorrectly entered and your reporting is distorted: everything needs to be reprocessed!
The tools set up to simplify the management of this process are in the end not (correctly) used, and objectives are not achieved. The management control team wastes time and money trying to contact everyone to close on time and avoid impacting other processes.
💡 Solution: Include your UPDATED operating procedure in the FAQ on your tool’s page with Shortways, or a contextual help next to the field title to share the Excel file listing all the categories to help them find their own!
With Shortways, your content is updated in just a few clicks in our back office. No need to go back and take a screenshot, edit it, replace it in the right place in the user manual, save it, re-upload it to the intranet and share it again. Simply edit the step-by-step that has changed, click on save, and you’re done! The help is always available in the right place, ready to be used.
7: Give reminders 💉
As indicated in point n°1, after the deployment of your ERP, your users have probably forgotten everything since the initial training course. There are many tools and the functional depth of the processes is vast. The human brain can’t remember everything.
It is normal and predictable that users will have questions or problems post-deployment, even with very simple functionalities or processes.
All the questions and use cases may not have been anticipated during training.
Moreover, as your company grows, new users will join who have not undergone this initial training.
Regular reminders are therefore vital for the life of your tool in the daily lives of your users.
💡 Solution: Are you approaching the peak buying season? Push a full-page notification that your users won’t miss with our DAP to remind them of the essential information.
Do you get a lot of support requests on the same topic? Create an FAQ with the answer directly on the right screen in the application.
8: Analyse the use of your tool 📊
Communicating and training users is key. Analysing their real behaviour on the tool in question is even better!
Analysing the screens which are causing problems gives a clear and quantified vision of the improvements to be made.
Even after a deployment, unexpected drifts or use cases can happen.
Analysing the statistics allows you to react quickly: are recurring questions detected by the support team? Is a field incorrectly filled in on a screen? Don’t users go to the end of a process? Then there may be a problem with the way your application is used or understood by users.
You must understand where users are having difficulties, which steps they don’t understand or which features are most frequently used in your application to adapt the different help content.
💡 Solution: The Shortways Analytics platform allows you to see which walkthroughs have been played the most and which FAQs have been consulted the most. Thus, you can identify the processes that need the most support.
The search bar returns keywords that did not display any results, allowing you to determine which missing content needs to be created.
Too many recurring support questions? Create an FAQ to answer it from the tool.
9: Get feedback 💬
The best way to fail is to ignore the opinions of users, and eliminate some of the resistance that still exists.
What could be more relevant than the opinion of those who use the ERP daily?
As we have already seen, if all those involved in the Finance/Purchasing application project are required to participate, feedback is an excellent lever for achieving this.
Implementing a feedback culture means that employees feel listened to and involved, and are therefore more likely to adopt changes!
And at least, you make sure that you’re aligning objectives with real needs and the changes that need to be made.
💡 Solution: Dedicated workgroups, feature directly available from the tool, … There are many ways to collect needs and ensure adoption.
Half-yearly surveys or after key moments in your business are a good way of collecting feedback and implementing improvement actions.
Feedback is incorporated into the Shortways features. Users can give a green or red thumbs-up to indicate the utility of a content they have consulted, submit a suggestion for content to be created following a request for assistance, or indicate that a content is missing from their query via the search bar.
10: Consider continuous improvement 🔄
Using your tool correctly doesn’t stop with deployment, it’s a daily job. Your tool, your company, the legislation, the market and the solutions are constantly evolving.
A continuous improvement approach to your user support is essential. Analysis and detection of blocking points in the application, creation of new targeted help content, enhancement of existing content, etc. There are a multitude of solutions to help smooth adoption when in the RUN phase.
A support must also be available for all users if they have any questions about the use of the ERP.
This support will be provided by key users, a business representative, the ERP support team or the IT department. To keep the tool up and running, it is important to analyse the questions received to detect common problems, and then implement actions to answer them.
💡 Solution: Your support content needs to be regularly updated and challenged to adapt to the life of your organisation.
As indicated in point n°8, the Shortways Analytics platform enables you to analyse the use of your tool and detect improvements to be made in your support content.
Our other solution, Smart Ticketing, allows your users to send an assistance request directly from their application. These requests are highly contextualised, enabling support to respond in 1 exchange by talking to the user in real time!
Is the adoption of your (future) Finance or Purchasing software one of your problematics?
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