Discover 10 proven strategies for improving ERP user adoption in your organisation and unlock the full value of your ERP investment with user-centric approaches.
An ERP implementation can be delivered perfectly and still fail, because the measure of success is not whether the system works. It is whether people use it. A technically flawless account that half the business works around has not delivered anything.
Adoption is treated as a soft concern and it is the hardest part of the project. What follows is a set of specific strategies rather than principles, ordered roughly by when they apply and by how much difference each makes.
The single highest return intervention, and it costs nothing extra because discovery is happening anyway.
People who were asked how their process works, and who saw their input reflected in the design, arrive at go live with a stake in the outcome. People who first encounter the system in training arrive as recipients of somebody else's decision.
The important qualification is involving the people who perform the work rather than only those who manage it. A manager describes the process as designed. The operator knows the exceptions, and the exceptions determine whether the system fits.
Include sceptics deliberately. They identify real problems, and a sceptic whose objection was addressed becomes a considerably more persuasive advocate than an enthusiast ever was.
The reason given for a systems project is usually the one that persuaded the board, and it rarely means anything to the people affected.
Improved data visibility and operational efficiency describe benefits accruing to the organisation. They do not describe anything that happens to the person reading.
What works is specific and personal. You will stop rekeying orders from email into two systems. You will see stock at the other warehouse without ringing them. You will stop chasing approvals.
Where a particular group genuinely gains nothing, say so rather than inventing a benefit. People know when they are being sold to, and a manufactured benefit costs more credibility than an honest acknowledgement.
The most credibility preserving thing a project can do and the one most often avoided.
Every system change makes something harder for somebody. More fields, an approval that did not exist, a process with more steps because it now captures something the business needs.
Projects that only communicate benefits lose credibility the moment somebody encounters the cost, and after that everything else the project says is discounted.
The formulation that works is straightforward. This will take you two extra fields per order, and the reason is that finance currently cannot tell which customers are profitable.
People accept costs they understand considerably better than costs that were not mentioned.
A champion in each team, meaning somebody who learns the system early and becomes the person others ask, is the highest leverage structure available.
The reason is behavioural. Most post go live questions are small, and people ask the nearest available person rather than raising a ticket. If that person knows the answer, the question costs a minute. If they do not, the pair of them invent a workaround.
Choose on influence rather than position. The person colleagues already go to for help is the right choice whether or not they manage anyone.
Support them properly with early access, extra training, a direct line to whoever can answer harder questions, and acknowledgement that this is additional work. A champion role assigned without any of that is a title rather than a function.
The default approach, being one long session covering everything for everybody shortly before go live, produces very little retention.
Train by role, since a warehouse operator does not need the finance modules and including them wastes attention and increases the sense that the system is overwhelming.
Organise around tasks rather than features. A feature session covers the sales order record and its fields. A task session covers taking an order from a customer on credit hold, which is a thing that actually happens.
Task based material is easier to follow, easier to remember and directly transferable, and it exposes the awkward parts of your configuration, since a task that cannot be explained simply is usually one that was not configured well.
Training on a demonstration account teaches generic behaviour. People then encounter your forms, your custom fields and your terminology and have to translate, which is exactly the point at which they lose confidence.
Train in a sandbox mirroring your configuration, populated with recognisable data. Real customer names, real items, real scenarios.
The difference in engagement is immediate and obvious, and it has a useful side effect, since it surfaces configuration problems before go live rather than after.
It also lets people practise on situations they will actually encounter rather than on a tidy example that never occurs.
Retention from watching a demonstration is poor. Retention from completing a task yourself, with somebody available when you get stuck, is considerably better.
Structure sessions so every topic is demonstrated once and then performed by each attendee. That covers fewer topics per session and the topics covered actually stick.
Give people scenarios rather than instructions. Process this order, which has a part shipment and a discount. Working out how is what produces understanding, and being told each click does not.
And keep sessions to ninety minutes at most, since attention degrades sharply beyond that and people stop asking questions.
Skills decay, so training too far ahead of use is wasted. Training on top of go live competes with everything else happening.
The workable window is close enough that the skill is used soon after, with enough space that people are not already overwhelmed. Two weeks before cutover for core tasks is a reasonable default.
Follow with a short refresher in the first days of live running, when people have real questions arising from real work.
And schedule periodic tasks separately. Nobody retains month end training delivered in week one and used in week five, so that material belongs in the week it is needed.
This period does more to determine long term adoption than anything else, because habits form quickly and workarounds invented now become permanent.
Make help immediate and visible. Somebody physically present, a channel answered in minutes, whatever fits your business. The gap between hitting a problem and getting help is the variable that matters.
Deliberately over resource it. Support that is slightly excessive for two weeks costs far less than the workarounds that grow in its absence.
Accept that productivity will dip. Planning for it makes it a known cost. Being surprised turns it into a crisis and generates pressure to abandon parts of the system.
A field in an awkward place, a form with unnecessary steps, a default that is wrong for most cases.
These are cheap to correct and they carry disproportionate weight in how people judge the system, because they are what people encounter repeatedly.
Fixing them quickly demonstrates that raising things produces a result, which determines whether people keep raising things.
Publicising the fix matters as much as making it. When something raised on Monday is fixed by Wednesday and people are told, the message is that the project is listening. Issues raised into silence teach the opposite lesson just as fast.
People rarely announce that they have stopped using part of the system, because from their perspective they solved a problem.
The abandonment is invisible unless you look for it. Sit with a team and observe how a task actually gets done. The spreadsheet on the second monitor tells you more than any status report.
Ask specifically rather than generally. Is everything working gets a polite yes. Show me how you processed that order this morning gets the truth.
And look at the data. Are the reports built during the project being run? Is there activity in the modules you expected? Low usage of something that should be busy is a signal worth investigating.
Adoption fails fastest where managers are ambivalent, and it fails quietly because nobody says so.
Managers set the standard by what they tolerate. One who accepts a spreadsheet because it is quicker this once has made the workaround official for their team.
They also set it by what they use. A manager who asks for a figure by email rather than opening the dashboard is signalling that the system is not the real source of truth.
This needs to be an explicit expectation rather than an assumption. Managers use it themselves, expect their teams to, and raise problems rather than routing around them.
Some resistance is a correct response to a genuine problem, and the ability to tell the difference is what makes an adoption programme credible.
When somebody says the new process is slower, find out whether it is. Sometimes it is unfamiliarity. Sometimes the process genuinely has more steps than it needs.
Fixing real problems visibly does more for adoption than any amount of communication, because it demonstrates that the project distinguishes between complaints and findings.
Dismissing a real defect as resistance is the fastest way to lose the people whose cooperation you need most.
Generic help does not describe your forms, your fields or your approval rules, which is why nobody uses it.
What works is short task based material. How to raise a purchase order in our system, with our fields. One page, screenshots from your account, findable in seconds.
Where it lives matters as much as what it says. Documentation in a folder nobody browses may as well not exist.
And it needs an owner, since material describing last year's configuration is worse than none. People who follow it and find it wrong stop trusting all of it.
A few simple measures beat impressions and none require sophistication.
The recurring question is the most actionable. Three people asking the same thing is a training gap or a configuration that does not match how people think, not three careless people.
Adoption is not finished when the initial noise settles, and several things need continuing attention.
New starters need a defined onboarding path rather than a colleague showing them whatever they happen to know, since otherwise misunderstandings propagate by word of mouth.
Existing users benefit from a second round of training several months in, once they have enough experience for advanced material to be meaningful.
Reporting gaps need closing, because unmet reporting needs are the most reliable source of new spreadsheets.
And the deferred list needs revisiting, since people remember what they were promised and lose faith when it never arrives.
Across projects the same handful of things separate good adoption from poor. People were involved before they were trained. Reasons were explained in terms that mattered to them. Support in the first fortnight was fast and visible. Small problems were fixed quickly and publicly. Managers used it themselves. And somebody kept paying attention after the project team dispersed.
None of those are expensive. All of them require somebody being responsible for adoption specifically rather than assuming it follows from the system working.
Our piece on NetSuite user adoption covers the underlying reasoning, and the communication plan covers the half that most projects leave to chance.
Our approach to NetSuite training builds from what people actually need to do rather than from a standard syllabus.
If adoption has slipped and you are looking at a business that works around its system, get in touch.
