Why your ERP training program is failing your employees
What internal expertise looks like in practice
In my doctoral research, I interviewed six IT managers from small businesses who had each led successful ERP implementations. Five of the six identified role-based, department-specific training as essential to their outcome. What distinguished their approach was not that they spent more on training. It was that they built the training capability inside the organization rather than contracting it out.
The approach that worked most consistently was identifying one person from each affected department early in the implementation, before configuration even began. That person became the departmental expert: involved in design decisions, consulted on how their team’s processes mapped to the new system and ultimately responsible for either delivering training to their colleagues or co-leading it alongside a formal trainer.
This is sometimes called a super user model, and the research supports its effectiveness. But what I observed in the implementations that worked goes beyond the mechanics of the model. The departmental expert brought something a vendor trainer cannot: credibility. When the warehouse supervisor learns the receiving process from someone who has worked in that warehouse, who understands the exceptions and the edge cases and the way things truly flow on a busy day, the training resonates in a way that a generic session never can.
