ERP Training Stinks
As ERP implementations falter and fail, many people think the answer is more training. They're wrong.
While that is reassuring news, the analysts are less sanguine. "Very wide ranges make industry averages meaningless," observes Debra Hofman, managing director of Benchmarking Partners, whose own study found that even though training averaged 8 percent of total project cost, the actual costs of training ranged anywhere from 1 percent to 30 percent. CIOs who aim for the average figure (and nearly every CIO interviewed for this story could instantly cite what percentage of their company's implementation costs were dedicated to training) may therefore be running the risk of undershooting the target requirement.
Senior Doesn't Mean Smarter
And therein lies another problem. ERP training needs to embrace senior management—and early on in the process, when budgets and timescales are still fluid, argues AMR Research's Shepherd. "Senior managers often don't particularly want to be told that there's a high level of risk and that there's a great deal of expenditure involved in minimizing it," he maintains. "It's just not a message they want to hear." The result is an invidious conspiracy of silence. "The people with the message don't want to tell it, and the people to whom it should be told don't want to hear it."
In particular, he worries, the senior and middle management of American companies don't have the extensive operating background of, say, their German counterparts. "Unlike in German companies, where managers have engineering degrees and shop floor experience, too many American managers have management degrees and have come from business school straight into a management role," says Sheperd.
The result? A critical blind spot when it comes to understanding how their brand-new systems actually operate in the lives of their employees and on the shop floor. But with awful examples like Hershey and Whirlpool to focus their thoughts, companies may be expected to give some hard thought to eliminating that blind spot.
It's either that, or that light you see at the end of the implementation tunnel will probably turn out to be that of an oncoming train. And you know how that story ends.
