Individual Change… An individual may be confronted with a new user interface, a new “best practice”, a different way to make decisions, or any number of new requirements. When this is the case, individuals will tend to experience one or more of the following five key factors: fear, anxiety, confusion, loss of control, or erosion of power or influence in the organization. The more an individual feels any of these emotions, the less likely they are to accept the new way of doing things. Lack of acceptance will diminish or delay the benefits of the ERP effort…

Individual Change was something I dealt with on a daily basis during the implementation at each of the plants I was involved with.  To overcome the fears, anxiety, confusion, and loss of control or power, one of the things I stressed during my training sessions was how much impact the employee had during the process.  I made them aware of the many things that occurred in the background when they processed a transaction; including raw material consumption and inventory movement.  I also explained how that transaction impacted the rest of the business processes such as costing and planning.

This additional, non essential, information, made the employee realize not only how powerful the system was, the but the importance of completing the transaction accurately and in timely manner.  A side benefit of knowing what happened as the transaction processed and what impact a transaction had on other business processes,  was the ability to think, on the fly, of how to correct a problem that occurred outside of the typical business process.

I am on a slightly new project at work now. I have been working heavily on my old project getting labels applied to units of board by hand and all that goes with that in our ERP system. Now I am working with plants that have a lot of robotics get these labels applied and ERP transactions performed automatically. The plant I am at now in Norfolk Virginia is one of USG’s newest plants, well, newest board lines. Since it is so new, it has pretty much the most robotics of any of our plants, so that is really neat. We are scheduled to turn the board line on within a month, and we need to have our labeler all set by then. I am the one that is responsible to get the labeler online and transacting by the time the board line gets started.

The picture above is the printer (Zebra 170PAX4) that is part of the whole labeling system. I don’t have a picture of the entire machine, but it is really quite amazing.