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Orica Consumer Products Improves
SAP User Productivity with SupportPoint
Customer ProfileOrica Consumer Products (OCP) manufactures and markets consumer products used in home improvement, architectural maintenance, and construction. OCP is a major division of Orica (ASX: ORI), one of the few truly global Australian-based companies, with 14,000 employees, operations in 50 countries, and customers in about twice that many. Orica is a world leader in mining services and Asia-Pacific market leader in its consumer products, Chemnet and chemical service businesses. OCP produces paints and stains, powder coatings, garden products, and automobile-care goods with iconic brands such as Dulux, Selleys, Yates, and TurtleWax.Parent
company Orica uses SAP as its primary ERP system for all its divisions, has a
shared services model, and, as early as 2001, developed an e-commerce shop
front-end that interfaced with SAP.
The Challenge: Effectively Training Employees for an SAP Upgrade and New Business Processes
Training and supporting OCP’s employees on
its SAP-driven business processes had been a struggle from the start. The initial SAP implementation in 2000 and
the Selleys SAP upgrade in 2001 had training resources, but those had lasted
only for the duration of the introduction of the new systems. SupportPoint had provided some supporting
documentation for the initial SAP implementation in 2000. But in 2004, OCP had fewer than two dedicated
full-time staff to train and support 850 employees for yet another SAP upgrade. The already over-committed training team had
to build employee competency in the updated systems and processes, and collect
and reinforce best practices.
OCP’s limited budget had ruled out
outsourced training and documentation. The trainers had abandoned most pre-roll-out
classroom training for IT systems and processes due to cost, time and especially
poor retention of lessons on the part of employees. E-learning and simulations would only fill
some of the gaps in pre-launch training, so post-training support would be
required for better on-the-job performance.
OCP needed an on-demand solution suited to a rapidly evolving work
environment that would both ease the adoption of new business processes and
sustain performance after roll-out.
The
Solution: Just-in-Time, On-Demand Training through SupportPoint
According to SAP Learning Manager Co-ordinator Julie Challinor, OCP needed “something very simple, very flexible, and
very easy to use” on every workstation that could maintain documents, external
links, and incorporate online learning, testing, and tracking for every
employee.
SupportPoint’s electronic performance
support system (EPSS)—delivering relevant and actionable information about an
organization's specific systems, processes, policies, tasks, and products—was
the solution Challinor was looking for. With SupportPoint, OCP accomplished its support goals for
the SAP users in a practical, centralized, and pervasive way. As Challinor noted, “It’s there, it’s easy,
and it’s where things are, so it’s the enabler of all things.” SupportPoint improved operational
effectiveness by helping employees use the SAP tools and apply related business
processes correctly. The productivity gains ensured higher returns on OCP’s investment
in SAP, greater compliance on the part of employees with policies and
procedures, and fewer man-hours lost to rework.
SupportPoint supported SAP users at OCP at all points of the learning cycle by getting them up-to-speed faster, keeping them informed on system and process changes, and helping them get more out of the SAP upgrade. They could access documents, training materials, and any content they needed through in-application context-sensitive or keyword searches. Factory supervisors, production teams, purchasing staff, and back-office employees, and even an off-shore contact center within Orica used SupportPoint to do their jobs better through the improved use of business systems and processes.
The Results: Sustainable Productivity with SAP Users across OCP
End users relied on SupportPoint to stay up to date with SAP systems through process documentation “at their fingertips”. Unlike previous upgrades, the internal help desk experienced fewer service calls at the beginning of the upgrade, and the number declined thereafter.
In addition, the project team could now communicate new processes (streamlined from 200 down to 80 in the case of Customer Service) so users could understand and comply with the latest best practices and productivity improvements. And with the EPSS, new and past SAP users learned “how to do the job quicker” and get more out of transactions and reports.
Orica found other innovative uses of SupportPoint to facilitate performance with changed systems and new processes and products:
- Collaboration - In a project to modify the SAP pricing model, 150 employees used SupportPoint to collaborate and communicate the changes to the entire division.
- Product Roll-Out – The powder group designed a product knowledge base for its new products, and shared it with other parts of the company, facilitating company-wide use.
- Compliance – OCP uses SupportPoint as a training portal to facilitate mission-critical learning and compliance with health, safety and environmental policies and government regulations
- Contact Center Support – Prior to implementation of SupportPoint, new agents based off-shore initially went through six weeks of training before getting on the phone. With SupportPoint in place, agents could begin phone work within the first week, as part of a newly developed three-month staged induction process of on-the-job training and support.
Future Plans:
Shared Services at Orica, which covers areas such as Finance and HR, will begin using SupportPoint more heavily. Shared Services will be relying on SupportPoint’s localization capabilities to develop customized versions of support documentation, all originating from a core set of processes and procedures, for different business divisions. Then, as the core set of materials change, SupportPoint’s localization capabilities will assist owners of the customized materials to identify and incorporate those changes into their customized materials.
According to Challinor, without a lot of training resources, SupportPoint has allowed OCP, to “pare back processes to the minimum, so there’s less to maintain, while keeping content current, brief and focused.” As a result its effectiveness, SupportPoint now plays a key role in OCP’s strategy for sustaining the growth of its business systems.
SupportPoint is a mainstay of induction programs and “a safety net for everyone, as well as part of our change management plan.” noted Challinor. She is proud of Orica’s “performance-focused and results-focused” culture and the performance support system has served them well. SupportPoint gives Orica the potential to ensure that its employees can adapt to future changes in procedures, systems and policy accurately and efficiently - first time, every time.
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 employee productivity with applications and processes, while reducing training and support costs.
Organizations with complex processes and systems use SupportPoint to offer self-service support that delivers 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 increase productivity and service levels.
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