"The human-factor side of ERP—understanding the relationship between the people in receiving, shipping, manufacturing and the customer—is crucially important," adds Johnnie Foster, vice president and CIO of St. Louis-based specialty chemical manufacturer Solutia. The timetable for Solutia's own SAP R/3 implementation, which concluded in May 1999, he adds, was driven both by the need to achieve Y2K compliance as well as separate from former parent Monsanto. "Now we're going back, taking it to another level and getting people to better understand their role in the process: This is what you're doing, this is why you're doing it and here's how it impacts other people," he says.

The Black Hole of Middle Management
Without understanding the whys of the process, decisions that would make sense in a pre-ERP environment quickly turn sour—particularly when those decisions are made by middle managers whose day-to-day tasks revolve not around the computer screen but the directing of people who sit at the computer. "We call it the black hole of middle management," says Implementation Management Associates' Fiman. The problem that he identifies is one of cultural inertia. "Companies have confused culture with wallet cards," he says, referring to the printed crib sheets on which businesses set out their value statements and mission statements in a handy-but-forgettable format.The result? Managers who talk the talk but walk any which way they choose.

Consequently, when companies hit Hershey-style problems, there's an instinctive middle management reaction to ship products to customers rather than lose sales even if that means circumventing the system, says David Dobrin, chief business architect at Benchmarking Partners in Cambridge, Mass. And, says Dobrin, that's just about the worst thing you can do. Not only does the order still sit in the system, ostensibly unfulfilled, but the actual inventory is now out of whack with the inventory logged in the system. And without the shipment going through the system, it's hard to raise an invoice. "The ship-it-anyway syndrome is definitely a lack of understanding," slams Dobrin. "People need to know what an incredibly stupid idea that is."

Training in how to operate the system will not, however, help the middle manager see down the road far enough to decide to forgo the short-term benefit of shipping product come what may. Only a broader-based, holistic education in the company's ERP-mediated business processes will do that.

But if end-user and middle-management training is so important, why isn't it given more priority? One answer, perversely, is that it is being given more priority—now. "Companies have begun to wake up to the fact that training is a key requirement," says Patrick Newton, former CEO and president of third-party training company DA Consulting Group of Houston. Training as a proportion of overall budgeted project costs was typically around 5 percent as recently as two years ago, he notes, citing analysts' published estimates. Now, he says, the figure has more than doubled, to around 11 percent of project budget.