Practice Your Way to ERP Adoption Success

Picture this.

The Houston Texans have finally made it to the Super Bowl for the first time in their twenty-five-year history. Head coach DeMeco Ryans sits down with ESPN’s Chris Berman to preview his strategy and says this:

1. He has developed huge binders filled with carefully crafted plays which will be distributed to the entire team.

2. He will spend a week walking through all the plays with his team in excruciating detail, using colorful PowerPoint slide decks.

3. The team will watch a video of each play once and then practice it once.

4. Then, they will return home with their huge binders with an encouragement to review the plays and come back on the day of the big game in about a month.

Sound like a winning strategy? Well, I wouldn’t be calling my bookie just yet, except maybe to bet against the Texans.

When explained like this, it is immediately obvious what is wrong with this approach. No matter how detailed the binders, or how colorful the PowerPoint presentations, until the team has practiced the plays over and over, they can’t master them.

In fact, according to a Brown University study, in order to learn a new task and make it stick, you should keep practicing past the point when you think you can’t do it any better, in other words, past the point of mastery. Such “overlearning” locks in the performance gains.

And yet, when it comes to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementations, most companies train their employees by making them take hours of eLearning and classroom training filled with theoretical information and sprinkled with light demonstrations and a few practice exercises. Employees are trained 3-6 months in advance with no reinforcement and then expected to go forth and become experts at go-live. What follows, at best, is months of frustration and rework leading to significant loss of productivity and low employee morale, and at worst, serious financial and reputational losses.

The better method is to approach ERP training like cybersecurity training. Today, most organizations make employees take cybersecurity training annually. And then, they put them through phishing simulations, sometimes as often as several times a week. Employees that fail the simulations then have to complete remedial training. Just as companies do not expect their employees to take one hour of cybersecurity training and become experts at spotting phishes, they should not expect one training class to create ERP experts.

If your organization is implementing an ERP application this year, here are three strategies that can help to build your employees’ expertise:

Break up your hours of training and incorporate spaced repetition in between to reinforce the learning with hands-on practice. For instance, if a role is required to take sixteen hours of training, break the training into four four-hour sessions. After each session and before the next one, require employees to complete four hours of practice and have experts available to provide immediate feedback and support them through the process.

Set up practice labs and follow classroom or online training with expert-led, drop-in practice sessions where employees can perform their real-life tasks and receive support as needed. Incentivize employees or use gamification techniques to motivate them to utilize the drop-in sessions.

Designate an overlap period (1-2 months) prior to go-live when your new system goes into production during which employees are required to repeat the same tasks in your old and new systems. Have your project team review entries into the new system to identify patterns of errors, and provide feedback, support and training remediation as required. While this will cut productivity in half during that period, once you go-live, your users will skyrocket to full productivity almost immediately.

ERP systems have come a long way since IBM developed its first MRP system in the 60’s. It’s time for ERP training to step into the twenty-first century too.