Six weeks after go-live at a 240-person equipment manufacturer, the usage report looked great: 180 of 190 licenses active. The plant director was pleased. Then I sat in the scheduling meeting.
The planner opened a spreadsheet on the second monitor. “I check the system,” she said, “then I do the real schedule here.” Six weeks in, the system was a reporting tool nobody trusted.
The difference between logging in and using
Logins count activity. They don’t count decisions. The reliable measure is simple: how many decisions in a week were made from system data, versus from a personal file?
We asked 12 people one question — “show me the screen you looked at before your last real decision.” Nine pulled up a spreadsheet. That is your adoption number, and it was 25%, not 95%.
- Pick one decision per role and track whether it was made in the system this week. Planner: the schedule. Buyer: the expedite list. Supervisor: the labor assignment.
- Delete or rename the old spreadsheets. Not blocked — renamed. A file called “OLD do not use” still gets used.
- Have the plant manager run the meeting from the system screen, projected. Two weeks of this changes more behavior than any training class.
- Name a process owner per department who is measured on usage, not on project tasks.
The training mistake we made
We had trained 190 people in four days, back to back. Retention after two weeks was close to nothing, because nobody used the screens in between. Training without a live task is entertainment.
The second attempt was different. Each person got one real transaction from their own queue, with a coach beside them, in their own work area. Ninety minutes of doing beat two days of watching by a wide margin. Weekly active use went from 62% at week six to 94% by week fourteen.
A 30-day plan that works
- Week one: name one process owner per department and give them a single usage number to move.
- Week two: run the “show me your screen” check with eight to twelve people. Write down what you find.
- Week three: replace classroom sessions with in-queue coaching, one real transaction per person.
- Week four: run one management meeting entirely from the system and let people see the data being trusted.
Adoption is a management behavior, not a training deliverable. If the plant manager still asks for the spreadsheet version, everyone below will keep making it. The fastest fix in ERP Consulting is often to stop printing the old report.