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Kimblerly-Clark has recently completed a US$100 million investment in SAP enterprise-resource planning software at 32 of its plants in North America, according to a report in InformationWeek.
It learned from the program that employee acceptance and training is often the biggest hurdle, said author Mary Hayes Weier.
The company spent $17 million to train 16,000 employees, many of them mill workers, on the new software. Many of them turned out to be first-time computer users and had to be taught everything.
“Kimberly-Clark's experience points to an issue that sometimes gets forgotten in the discussion of lengthy ERP implementations: the toll and time it takes to get people to use a new system, and use it properly. That's a particular problem in manufacturing, where skilled laborers are suddenly expected to get up to the speed of power desktop users when many have spent little time with PCs,” the article says.
Acceptance by employees was slow but apparently results were positive after they became more accustomed to the package and learned its benefits. For example, a mill worker no longer has to go to the spare parts store when he needs a replacement part. He simply enters what is required on the computer. The result should be a saving in time and money.More SAP rollouts are planned for next year at Kimberly-Clark, including an order-to-cash system, the article says. Kimberly-Clark also is beginning to take its rollout of the four initial business processes in North America to its operations in 37 other countries.
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