4 Training Issues in ERP Implementation and How to Avoid Them

Training is one of the most important factors to ensure every employee can do his/her job confidently. But how poor training ruins your ERP implementation efforts is the question.

Organizations often overlook the importance of training in making ERP implementation a success.

Training is the one of the reasons why ERP implementations fail in most organizations. To avoid this and ensure training is effective, you need to plan for training activities.

Here, we will detail the ways in which poor training ruins a company’s ERP implementation and the business as a whole. Avoiding these ensures the significance of proper ERP training.

1. Cognitive Overload:

Consider a training session which is designed in a way that its duration is around 6 hours and all the employees sit through this class. The session starts with an interesting and innovative introduction and goes on to the depth uninterestingly, where the learner can’t find what exactly the session is about and what the key outcomes are. The session might have 20 minutes of relevant and valuable stuff that every learner should know to hit their specific requirements. The key outcome of any training is to determine what portion of the training is relevant to the end users and why. They should not get a vague impression of how to accomplish their tasks.

2. Content vs. Context:

If the focus is on transactional vs. process based training, you’ll end up with people who can work with content, but are unable to predict or understand when and how to interact with the new business processes or the context. Often ERP implementation fails, because the training session is more focused on the content and not the context. For example, an employee attends a training session on the new software program and by the end of it, he knows everything about the software and how it works and what all it has, but he is not able to find out where exactly it must be used – the application or usage. To make training a success, concentrate on both content and the context.

3. Disappearing Resources

For the successful implementation of an ERP system, selecting right resource for the right project is important. Every organization creates a business case explaining the output, ROI, and impact of the system before the ERP implementation is approved. We see a few cases where end user training is pushed back to a continual series of task based interactions, which do not offer a clear view of the new process and when and how they interact with it. This leads to delays and operational errors.

4. Uncertainty:

The training needs must be clearly described when there is a change from a legacy process to a new process. You need to explain the how the old software for example, has upgraded and why you should adopt it. Target audiences will not adopt the new system or process completely or quickly if you don’t explain the advantages, specific steps, process cycle, reasons, etc. You have to clearly tell them the difference between the old and new process or system and also the changes that took place.

These are a few ways organizations miss critical targets, lose in training ROI, and mostly overrun costs by implementing training that does not align with the learner needs and goals.

Here’s our recommended evaluation framework to be followed. Every organization must:

• Include training as a part of its business plan
• Budget and schedule time for the project team and end-user training
• Explain its training specifics
• Try to keep its training plans at its forefront
• Hold byte-sized training sessions rather than hour long sessions
• Deliver training that helps end-users meet organizational needs in quality ways, with knowledgeable, reputable, and experienced trainers
• Struggle to ensure that its training is not a “weak-link”

Finally, this helps as a reference guide to avoid the ERP rollout training failures before implementation.

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