Fostering Productivity on New ERP Systems

One of the biggest complaints of many enterprises in the market for performance improvement or company-wide learning products is that vendors often push technology before other more immediate concerns, such as, what will happen if my knowledge workers forget some key step and require assistance? Who will provide it, and if no one does, what does that do to learning capabilities and productivity levels within my organization? Every forward-thinking enterprise values productivity, which is one of the first things to suffer when technological systems are not end-user-friendly. Finding a compatible vendor, one who provides efficient, cost-effective, real-time learning and support without unnecessary bells and whistles, is essential if organizations are to maximize the return on investment for learning.

When organizations are implementing new enterprise-wide technologies, untrained users may end up needing three to six times as much support as end users who have been trained, according to Chris Pickett, director of learning technologies for PeopleSoft Global Services. In addition, calls to the help desk that are generated due to a lack of learning equate to hard dollars. “For normal organizations in North America, a level-one help-desk call is $125,” Pickett said. “That’s the hard cost when you’re talking about rolling out an ERP (enterprise resource planning) system and end users not being trained properly. Where do they go? They pick up the phone, or they bug the person next to them. That’s a gray area. It’s hard to quantify lost productivity because you’re helping a co-worker, but if they’re helping other people, they’re not doing their job.”

PeopleSoft is working to partner with its clients to maximize user productivity on new implementations of its technology. Its User Productivity Kit (UPK) allows for multi-language content development customizable for documentation, performance support, and classroom and Web-based learning. It is available for all PeopleSoft products, and includes development accelerators and decelerators, and project plan templates to speed technology adoption in the enterprise. Perhaps equally important, the single tool set was designed for use by subject-matter experts. Though all of the online content is dynamic HTML, meaning it can be linked wherever necessary, it does not require hard-core HTML or multimedia programming skills to create.