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Eraring Achieves Successful ERP Upgrade with SupportPoint
Customer Profile
Eraring Energy of New South Wales, Australia is an electricity service provider with its own diverse production facilities and a trading division. Eraring?s production portfolio comprises coal-fired and thermal power stations, wind farms, hydro sites, and pumped storage schemes. Eraring is committed to developing its internal resources to capitalize on opportunities and create innovation.
The Challenge: ERP System Upgrade with Business Process Optimization
Eraring Energy was using an outdated version of Mincom's MIMS enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. The legacy software was part of a former parent company's IT infrastructure and was not configured to reflect the current business's processes and procedures. Eraring Energy wanted a user-friendly system with more advanced features and decided to upgrade to Ellipse, the latest ERP system from Mincom.
"We wanted to take advantage of the increased functionality of the Ellipse system as the catalyst for business process improvement," said Jeff Balkwill, IT Applications Manager, Eraring Energy." We also needed to increase staff acceptance and use of the software. Staff take-up of the earlier MIMS system was below expectations. We needed to improve usability if business processes and efficiencies were to be achieved this time around."
In order to facilitate staff acceptance of Ellipse, Eraring Energy realized it would need to not only provide initial training in the new system to all staff, but also provide ongoing support post go-live.
The Solution: SupportPoint
SupportPoint is a performance-centered knowledge management system that delivers relevant and actionable information about an organization's specific systems, processes, policies, tasks, and products. With SupportPoint, employees know the right way to work - first time and every time.
SupportPoint improves operational effectiveness by helping employees use systems and apply processes correctly. This ensures higher returns on investment in new systems, greater compliance with policies and procedures, and less rework resulting from confusion about how work is supposed to be done.
"We knew we'd need assistance with preparing the training material," said Balkwill. ?We also wanted to implement an online help capability that our staff could use after they?d received their training and were using the system in their work environment. SupportPoint was perfectly suited to our requirements."
The Result: More Effective Training and Support
With Panviva consultants, Eraring Energy identified the workflows and procedures involved in specific business areas so that training materials and post-training documents could be developed to assist the pre and post-deployment processes.
Panviva then worked with Eraring Energy to document the associated business processes and procedures and incorporated these into the SupportPoint knowledge system.
The results: Less up-front training and more job proficiency with the new system
Due to the procedural and online help documentation prepared for SupportPoint, separate training materials were not required. Instead, employees underwent initial classroom training using the procedures documented in SupportPoint. If further assistance was needed, employees were able to use SupportPoint to look up specific procedural or help information or to complete online training.
"Working with SupportPoint meant that the training for the new system was far more comprehensive and overcame the problems we experienced in the past, where a lot of people didn't use it simply because they didn?t know how to," said Balkwill. " With the Ellipse upgrade, we didn't have this problem. Staff enjoyed the training and found it beneficial. They think SupportPoint is great as a just-in-time training tool and procedural aid."
This meant that Eraring Energy achieved better staff competency while limiting the amount of up-front time required to prepare training material. Furthermore, new employees can now use SupportPoint to help them navigate through the Ellipse system. It is also used as a refresher training tool for staff whose roles have changed or who need to become conversant with other aspects of Ellipse.
The Results: Increased Business Process Productivity
Increased staff acceptance and competence in the new system meant increased use of Ellipse across the organization. This led to significant operational improvements in areas such as procurement and financial reporting.
"As staff are now more comfortable using Ellipse, due to both the training they received and the online knowledge function of SupportPoint, we have noticed a decrease in people developing their own systems and processes outside of Ellipse," said Balkwill." Now, rather than staff creating databases or spreadsheets in Excel or Access, nearly all work is done within Ellipse and SupportPoint. This means less conflicting information is produced."
Future Plans: Expanded Usage
Although only around 30 per cent of Ellipse's functions were initially documented in SupportPoint, Eraring Energy is progressively documenting more and more of its business processes in the system.
"As the company identifies processes and functions that should be devolved to other areas of the business, procedural documentation is added to SupportPoint," Balkwill said. SupportPoint has certainly helped us achieve our short-term objectives and I expect it will continue to do so into the future.
Panviva: Developers of SupportPoint
Panviva’s performance support system, SupportPoint, is a knowledge base solution that provides fast, targeted access to structured documentation about systems, processes, and products. SupportPoint improves adoption of applications and processes, while reducing training and support costs.
Organizations with complex processes and systems use SupportPoint to offer self-service support that builds know-how at the moment-of-need. SupportPoint delivers structured, up to date, and personalized content that gives users rapid access to just the information they need to complete the task correctly. Globally, more than 50,000 users rely on SupportPoint across a broad range of industries to reduce processing errors, strengthen compliance, and increases customer service levels.
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