The result was an awkward first day, which, Hunt recalls, "saw end users at the very first break on the very first day of training stating that they were going home unless someone came into the classroom to help them translate the material." The problem? "A complete system change is like learning a language," explains Hunt. "In the beginning, you need to translate the new language into the old in order to understand the meaning. In this case, our trainers couldn't provide that translation, as they didn't understand our processes—for example, they could demonstrate how to enter a goods receipt, but they couldn't explain when you should do it, or how to find the right purchase order to apply it to."

In the end, says Hunt, it became clear that the training company just wasn't up to the job. "We asked them to leave at the end of the first week." Rather than opt for another third-party provider, Hunt and his team spent six months constructing a course that they could deliver themselves—and did so, in a complete reversal of the original strategy.

What Hunt and Purina Mills discovered was that what their employees really wanted and needed to learn about was the whys, wheres and whos of the business process not the hows of the ERP system.

"Companies often mistakenly regard SAP implementation as a purely technical issue," affirms Byron Fiman, principal and cofounder of Implementation Management Associates, a Brighton, Colo.-based change management consultancy. "In fact, at least half the issues in ERP disasters are not technical but people related and culture related." In terms of getting things right, he adds, "the soft stuff is really the hard stuff."

And even if a Hershey- or Whirlpool-style disaster doesn't loom, a failure to deliver benefits is all too likely. "The screens are up, but nothing has changed: the cycle times are the same, customer satisfaction metrics don't shift and the costs remain the same," Fiman says. The problem is that too many companies pay lip service to the education part of the pre-ERP change management process. "Every SAP implementation partner says that training is important, but it's often one of the first things to go when the talks about pricing get tough."

Millions for Software, Pennies for Understanding
Too many companies treat training as a check-the-box activity," says Dan Klein, vice president of education services at PeopleSoft. "The resulting mind-set: 'Did you train the users?' 'Yup, we trained the users.'"