Schering Healthcare
Schering had adopted Siebel´s customer relationship management (CRM) software to replace the organisation´s previous territory management system. The goal for Siebel´s CRM application was to enable information sharing and the analysis of critical business data among sales representatives, head office functions, and senior managers.
There were a number of lessons learnt by the implementation team during the introduction of the CRM application. The team learnt not to underestimate the time and commitment needed to train employees in a new application, particularly in order to overcome change resistance, and also not to underestimate the time taken to develop and manually produce training manuals.
Some 18 months later, Schering was preparing for another significant enterprise rollout, this time of Cognos PowerPlay®, analytic processing software to analyse large volumes of data, and Visualiser®, a companion software to create data visualisations.
The Project
Late in 2003, Schering´s Sally Bennett, an internal Human Resources Development Consultant, knew she faced a number of challenges for the next chapter in the company´s enterprise application rollout. Sally wanted to make sure that she applied the lessons learnt from the previous implementation. For Cognos, adoption by all the end-users was imperative. Sally explained, "Without Cognos, there´s just no way for our representatives and business managers to track their sales and activities. Obviously, you need to know where your sales are strong to be able to plan properly." For the scheduled Cognos implementation, Schering´s Human Resource Development (HRD) team wanted to implement a training platform that would ensure user proficiency post launch, and ensure ongoing support.
The Solution
Sally heard about OnDemand Personal Navigator (now known as User Productivity Kit) from Larmer Brown, a certified business partner of OnDemand Software. Sally recalled, "When I saw the comprehensive functionality offered by OnDemand Personal Navigator, I just wanted to cry. I had put so many hours into developing training manuals in the past, not knowing there was a platform available that could have trained the employees and published an effective training manual for me."
Schering quickly laid plans to roll out Cognos and its OnDemand Personal Navigator training in 2004. The training solution would begin with a three-hour ‘Train the Trainer’ session for the Schering HRD team, which also included a one-hour session of self-paced learning. Schering HRD planned to use OnDemand Personal Navigator to develop an 80-page training manual, and the team would then deliver 28 hours of classroom training for the 135 employees who needed to learn the Cognos application.
Working to very tight timescales to match business needs left only three weeks to develop content in OnDemand Personal Navigator before the Cognos launch date. This is when OnDemand Software made good on its promise to reduce content development time and to increase time to competency, enabling Schering to increase its software utilisation. Developers from Larmer Brown were resourced to assist Schering in meeting their timelines.
During the one-day ‘Train the Trainer’ session, Sally and her colleagues learned how to develop content. The benefits were immediately apparent: OnDemand Personal Navigator streamlined content development. Sally said, "OnDemand not only runs the training for you, it provides a framework for superior training." OnDemand Personal Navigator allowed content developers to write content and at the same time, access and revise each screen shot. That meant changes could be made right up until training delivery. Sally added, "It works brilliantly. You don't have to know everything in the system to write good content."
With the help of eight Schering training partners, Schering succeeded in delivering 28 hours of training to 135 end-users. OnDemand Personal Navigator allowed end-users to practice on their own systems, which was critical to the success of the Cognos implementation. Users had particularly wanted simulations so that they could look at real data, and OnDemand Personal Navigator was able to deliver.
The Conclusion
When asked to compare the training used in the Cognos rollout with previous enterprise implementations Sally Bennett commented, "After previous rollouts we had significant initial problems with user proficiency, utilisation and so on. With OnDemand Personal Navigator, our users were able to learn and understand Cognos business processes quickly and easily, significantly contributing to the success of the implementation."