Situation
In order to optimize their business processes, a local county government organization in Pennsylvania needed to upgrade their legacy financial and supply chain systems. The key business drivers for this initiative included:
- Modernization of financial processes
- Standardization of supply chain business processes
- Implementation of new grants accounting module
- Improved workforce efficiency
- Continuous improvement/Process optimization
The county firmly believed that for these benefits of upgrading to the Infor CloudSuite solution to be fully realized, their staff must understand what was changing and be ready, willing, and able to adapt to the new business processes and technology.
Challenge
The county required a comprehensive end user training solution and engaged GP Strategies® to ensure full adoption of the upgraded system including new modules in grants accounting. The end user training activities needed to focus on both system knowledge and new business processes while establishing new best practices. With significant staff turnover and limited training in the past, the end user community did not have the knowledge to take advantage of their existing ERP system and had developed manual processes and bad practices over the years.
After conducting an in-depth training analysis over several weeks, GP Strategies recommended the county adopt a new learning methodology and revitalize their whole approach to enterprise application adoption.
Solution
The primary elements of this new approach needed to achieve the following:
- Establish a culture of learning
- Provide a learning journey and not just a one-time training event
- Keep knowledge fresh and future proof against ongoing change
The cornerstone of the solution was a Digital Adoption Platform, a central knowledge repository with the ability to continuously reinforce learning after go live. Infor’s User Adoption Platform (UAP) provided end users with step-by-step guides and videos from within the new Infor application. Users were taught to help themselves first before reaching out to support, thereby creating personal responsibility for their learning development and minimizing post go live support.
Each user was given a role-based learning journey to complete. Before go live, end users were prepared with a series of learning mediations including self-paced eLearning, webinars, brown bag sessions, instructor-led training, and hands-on “walk-in labs” to build up their knowledge. After go live, users received follow-up learning videos and coaching sessions to reinforce knowledge. The learning targeted end user job roles and presented real-world scenarios for end users to complete with assessments.
UAP was used to accelerate the development of training materials for each of the learning journeys. The ability to rapidly create eLearning courses, video simulations, and contextual help documentation was invaluable. The training development team was able to create a large amount of training materials under very tight deadlines and quickly respond to last-minute configuration updates as needed. Using UAP’s digital workflow, GP Strategies routed training materials to the county subject matter experts for review and editing. This collaborative approach helped ensure that new business processes were captured in the training materials along with business context.
Results
The positive feedback from the user community indicated the new training methodology and Digital Adoption Platform worked and helped the county successfully adopt complex business processes while minimizing the disruption to their work during go live. After go live, system changes and updates could be deployed rapidly to the workforce with minimal effort and disruption. This new approach to learning is now the county’s blueprint for future system adoption. The client achieved:
- Increased user adoption of Infor’s CloudSuite Financials and Supply Chain Managemnet (SCM) system
- Improved just a one-time support with a Digital Adoption Platform (DAP)
- Enhanced learner experience
