The go-live party had catering. There were t-shirts. Fourteen months and a lot of money later, six weeks into “live,” I sat in a meeting where a warehouse supervisor admitted she kept her old spreadsheet running because she didn’t trust the new system and nobody had asked her opinion.
She wasn’t being difficult. She was being rational.
What the project plan never mentioned
This was a 250-person specialty chemicals distributor. The project plan was thorough — 340 tasks, weekly steering meetings, a color-coded RAG report. What it didn’t contain was a single line about who would do what differently on the Monday after go-live.
The process design had been built by a project team of nine, seven of whom were managers. The people who actually processed orders, receipts and returns saw the system for the first time in a two-hour training session, four days before launch.
Nobody had asked a single order-entry clerk how the old process worked. Three of the new screens required information the clerk didn’t have at the moment of entry, so she learned to type placeholder values. Those placeholders are now in your data.
Three signs in month one everyone ignored
- Order entry times rose from 4 minutes to 11. The project team called it a learning curve. It didn’t improve, because the screen order didn’t match how customers actually placed orders.
- Nobody escalated anything in the first three weeks. That’s not satisfaction — that’s people quietly giving up and going around the system.
- Two resignations in the operations team, both good people, both citing “the new system.” Attrition is the most expensive bug report you’ll ever get.
The recovery: 90 days of undoing
They stopped the rollout to remaining sites and did something painful — they sat four end users in a room with the process design and asked what they’d change. That list ran to 60 items. Half got fixed within six weeks, mostly screen order, mandatory fields that shouldn’t have been mandatory, and one report that had to print the way the old one printed because the customer’s receiving dock expected it.
Six months later, adoption was measurable: 94% of orders entered in the system, and average entry time down to 5 minutes. The win wasn’t the software. It was that people had been given a reason to trust it.
Any ERP Consulting engagement worth the name will spend more time on this than on configuration. Configuration is knowable. Whether a supervisor at 6 a.m. trusts the screen is not, and it decides your outcome.
The lesson worth stealing
- Before you design a process, spend two full days sitting next to the person who does it today. Not in a workshop. At their desk.
- Pick your two most skeptical users and put them on the design team. They will find more problems than any consultant, and once they’ve fixed something themselves, they’ll defend it.
- Set a go-live metric that isn’t technical: order entry time, first-time-right rate, or the number of people still using a personal spreadsheet. Then track it weekly for 90 days.
The hard truth is that this company didn’t fail because of the software. They failed because they treated a change in how people work as a change in what software they use.