5 Ideas for Smoother Technology Implementations

In a recent MDM Webcast, Tim Hays, IT director for Animal Health International Inc., a distributor of animal health products, shared the distributor's five priorities when implementing SAP across its organization to ensure the transition would go smoothly.

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Animal Health was featured in Technology & Animal Health: One Distributor's Journey to a Billion Dollars.

Executive support. Because of the size of the organization, the CEO recorded video messages for employees. "The message from the top-down was this was not an IT project you can ignore," Hays said. "It's a change for the whole company. It's important for the future success and growth of our company, and we all support it 100 percent." The distributor also had a steering committee comprised of leaders throughout the company. "The support from the executive team was profound," Hays said.

Change management.  The distributor expected such a big transition would result in a lot of decision-making and a big change for most employees. The distributor tapped someone to be in charge of the change management process, and implemented a formal methodology to govern decision-making as it related to the project. They also documented the decision-making. "The key here was that in 30 days if someone would question that decision we could go back to the decision tracker and see that the decision was already made. It kept us from rehashing decisions that had already been made," Hays said.

Tight scope. The distributor wanted to keep customization to a minimum during the process. In the webcast, Hays highlighted reports that the system could generate; he said that they were able to reduce the number of reports from 1,200 (many of them one-offs with just a small change from the standard) down to 12.

Data migration. "I would encourage anyone listening to spend as much time possible cleaning up the data in legacy systems as possible," Hays said. "This is one of the significant challenges."

Early training. The national distributor wanted to start the training as quickly as possible to ease the transition when it went live with SAP. So it created computer-based training, featuring screenshots and transactions in SAP. The computer-based training also focused on SAP terminology. Employees had to go through this training and take tests as well as go through a computer simulation before the in-person training.

Watch a clip from this webcast below to hear more about the above topics. Interested in hearing more? Download this free 60-minute webcast.