An Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system would do wonders for a nationwide home furnishings distributor. Sales, finance, and accounting were struggling with the manual processes and spreadsheets required to track data across ten regions and 75 warehouses. Things were looking up with the purchase of a state-of-the-art ERP system that would enable consistent processes and integrated cross-company data. An in-house project management team and a third-party systems integrator would manage the implementation. However, the home furnishings client knew they’d need help translating the change’s impacts on their distributed workforce.
The client called a change management and operations excellence consulting firm they had worked with successfully in the past. They were confident that Clerestory could develop and execute an enterprise-wide training program. Two thousand five hundred employees needed to be prepared to work in new ways when the ERP system launched in each region.
It didn’t take long for Clerestory’s team of change management experts to diagnose the implementation plan’s critical risks. Yes, the client needed training. But it would only be successful if the client’s subject-matter experts and systems integrator could align on how to configure the technology to meet the business objectives. These groups required a shared understanding of the current business processes to redesign them for the future state and configure the ERP system to support that design. Only then could training bridge the gap between the current and future ways of working.
Fortunately, Clerestory knows how to get results. We provided stability and program leadership to align project resources with the implementation targets. Our team facilitated working sessions with business process owners, IT, and the systems integrator to resolve open questions on system functionality. As change management experts, we helped map both the current and future state business processes. Identifying the change impacts of the ERP implementation informed the training design that bridged those gaps. All the while, we led an agile training development process to rapidly design and develop course materials in parallel with critical decision making.
The Clerestory team:
- Developed more than 50 role-based courses to support the nationwide rollout of the ERP system.
- Coordinated the deployment timeline so each warehouse location would receive just-in-time training ahead of their scheduled ERP go-live.
- Onboarded a group of client subject-matter experts to learn our facilitation techniques and prepared them to deliver training at each location.
- Led interactive exercises and skills assessments to reinforce training and enhance user readiness.
Anticipating the first wave of implementations, Clerestory delivered over 125 training classes across the client’s headquarters and primary market. We accompanied learners through go-live, guiding them step-by-step as they encountered challenges in the system. We also developed self-guided tools and job aids that would continue reinforcing the new skills and knowledge over the long term.
We were so successful that we worked ourselves out of a job! We designed the curriculum in role-based modules, making it easy for the client to deliver the right content to the right learners at the remaining implementation sites. We taught the client team to own and facilitate the training, so we could easily turn it over to them. Our home furnishings client had a new ERP system. They also had the knowledge, skills, and people to put it to good use.
%
user participation rate across training
“Thanks so much for all your work! Clerestory has done an outstanding job in this huge undertaking.”
