Over the last month our company has been going through an ERP transition.  It has been a challenging experience as expected and feels far from over.  We are functional, but still have a long road to fully capture the features available to us.  We definitely still have things to improve upon before we feel comfortable.

Despite working towards this transition for more than a year, the first week was really rough.  Right out of the gate nothing worked like it should.  There were problems with the system itself.  There were problems with the data we imported.  There were definitely user created problems due to lack of knowledge or training.

So on day 3 I stepped in and rallied the troops.  It was time to walk through the system front to back and assess what worked, what didn’t, and determine what must be done to fix it.  Over that next 24 hours I tried or watched every process inside the ERP.  This achieved two things: gathered a real time assessment of our functionality and made me the company’s resident expert on the system.  The good news was we were more functional than we thought.

The learning curve was huge.  I learned a tremendous amount during that initial evaluation, then a ton more over the course of the ensuing weeks as we worked together to try and fix issues.  Having been the only person inside our company to see the process start to finish, I was able to learn how the system elements interacted with each other.  Most of the training up to that point had been point and click to get things done, which was not that useful when things did not proceed as expected or a mistake was made.

As I went throughout the organization solving problems, I found myself teaching a lot.  I knew that unless I wanted to run around every day repairing these same things, I needed to teach others what to look for.  They too would need to know how the system elements fit together, how to fix their own mistakes.  Since the system was so new to everyone, it forced me to be very slow and detailed in my teaching.

It was not until several days into the process that I realized how effective this method was.  Employees were responding really well.  They were retaining information on their own steep learning curve.  Despite the uncertainty, their stress levels dropped.  They even responded well to me.  There was a greater sense of sharing and transparency.  The genuine goal was to learn.

While this was a very challenging experience, it has been a great reminder and learning experience for me regarding how to teach others about the business.  This has been a struggle for me over the years.  I tended to inform others in a much different way.  As an auditory learner myself, I have lots of discussions, then ask others if they understand.  ERP forced me to show them visually.  Similarly, I typically feel there is much to share, so I pour out lots of information quickly, then move on.  Whereas this process felt excruciatingly slow in the small tidbits of information given in each session, the progress over the past 4 weeks has been greater than I usually achieve.  Apparently this slower, methodical teaching method leads to greater learning inside our organization.