Success Stories - Paper Company

Paper Company

The Customer

A large paper company, with eleven pulp mills, paper mills, and distribution centers around the country, is upgrading from WorldSoftware A8.1 to JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.0.

The Challenge

The company's implementor, a brand-name IT consulting company based in Sunnyvale California, did not include any time or budget for end-user training in the upgrade project plan. As a result, the company needs to generate training materials as quickly as possible before the training window opens (five weeks before go-live). Each of the company sites is responsible for its own training, but the materials need to be developed centrally, since the upgrade is being implemented by a centralized core team.

The company has UPK, having installed it late last year and used it to document JD Edwards Human Resources and Payroll modules in Phase 1 of the three-phase upgrade. They recorded UPK simulations specifically to generate paper Training Guides and Job Aids, not to use the See It!/Try It!/Know It!/Do It! simulation modes. This was relatively successful because Phase 1 affected fewer than 40 people company-wide.

Phase 2 of the upgrade affects thousands of users across 11 paper/pulp mills and distribution centers across the country, including Purchasing/Requisitions, Inventory Management, and Equipment Maintenance. A smaller group of users at each facility will use General Accounting, Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, and Fixed Assets. This requires a much more significant training effort. Oracle User Productivity Kit was selected as the best option to deliver training quickly to the maximum number of users across multiple locations, in the shortest amount of time.

The Solution

The company needed to get its UPK development process up and running quickly. The company chose Intelligo for Intelligo's long experience in User Productivity Kit, and its proven track record in developing end-user training materials and curriculum's for ERP system roll-outs. Intelligo delivered a three-week User Productivity Kit JumpStart workshop at the company's headquarters.

Standards Development and UPK Curriculum Planning

During the first week on-site, Intelligo worked with the designated UPK Administrator.  Together, they determined standards for colors, fonts, verbiage, outline structure, roles, development states, and other rules for how the new UPK topics should be developed and how the existing UPK topics should be organized. They also determined how the UPK printed output should look after applying Intelligo's custom Microsoft Word templates and running the special cleanup macros to provide a clean, crisp, table-free appearance.

Intelligo and the company UPK Administrator also determined who the UPK developers should be. Initially, the company had wanted to use business leads (like supervisors or managers) to develop the UPK content, because they knew the content best. Unfortunately, that seldom works well, because:

  • each business author develops his or her own content without regard to standards or level of detail (too much detail or not enough)
  • and the UPK content creation always takes a back seat to running the business, meaning that it either runs late or never gets developed at all

Instead, Intelligo and the UPK Administrator determined that a group of IT Help Desk people should be the UPK developers. The reasons for this were: 

  • the Help Desk people were new to the EnterpriseOne applications, but they would need to learn how to run the transactions anyway because they would have to support those transactions. (ANGELA – each Help Desk employee was going to be responsible for Application Support for a different area – Finance, or Maintenance, or Inventory, or Purchasing, or HR/Payroll)
  • the Help Desk people all worked in the same area, so they could work as a group and share information and UPK standards as they developed content and developed new standards
  • the Help Desk people would be dedicated full time to creating the UPK content before and during the training effort.

During the remainder of the first week, Intelligo created Quick Reference cards for UPK development standards , and applied the changes to the custom Intelligo templates for the UPK printed output. Intelligo worked with the UPK Administrator to obtain test scripts with data and menu navigation from the JD Edwards core team. Intelligo organized the existing Human Resources and Payroll UPK outlines, applied Roles to each of the Modules, Levels and Topics in those outlines, and determined and started a universal Glossary for the UPK team.

UPK Training Delivery

During the second week on-site, Intelligo delivered a four-day UPK class to the newly-chosen group of UPK developers, instructing them how to develop in UPK, how to publish Training Guides from UPK, how to clean them up with Intelligo's custom Word templates, and how to automatically generate Quick References (job aids) from specific parts of a Training Guide. Intelligo focused on communicating the agreed-upon standards to the developers, practicing development with real test scripts from the core team, and developing additional, more-detailed standards, for various scenarios, such as how to describe a particular action or result, how to structure simulations with Start frames, End frames and Explanation frames, and how to optimize the bubble text consistently for each of the playback modes (See It!, Try It!, Know It! and Do It!).

UPK Editing Assistance and Standards Enforcement

During the third week on-site, Intelligo led the effort to begin creating actual UPK content. Based on the test scripts from the JD Edwards core team, Intelligo helped organize the UPK developers and assign Modules, Lessons and Topics for them to develop. Intelligo helped build an outline for each module and assisted them in identifying questions to ask the JD Edwards core team when information was missing from the test scripts. Most importantly, Intelligo edited at least three completed UPK Topics for each developer, providing guidance and reinforcement to the standards and structure that each developer was supposed to follow. This helped start the UPK developers on their path of developing useful training content, using and reinforcing the skills and standards that they learned in the UPK class the week before.

The company had six developers, working to develop at least 400+ topics in six weeks, incorporating generic Oracle content where it is useful. Intelligo was also proud to offer development support, to co-develop alongside the company's developers to meet the goal by the time training began.

Intelligo's Value-Add

Intelligo demonstrated its value-add in the following:

  • Defined UPK standards for playback modes and for printed outputs
  • Defined standards for structure and verbiage (how to present and describe things consistently among multiple UPK developers)
  • Identified who should be trained to be the UPK developers
  • Pushed the core team to supply test scripts for the UPK developers to use
  • Pushed management to allow the UPK developers to work with the core team directly
  • Educated the team of UPK developers in how to use UPK effectively and efficiently
  • Organized existing UPK content
  • Applied roles and development states to existing UPK content
  • Created menu navigation Quick References for end users, so that menus didn't have to be included in the UPK simulations
  • Edited the simulations that the UPK developers created, ensuring that they use UPK correctly and that they are using the agreed-upon standards correctly

Intelligo's UPK JumpStart was able to get the company's UPK development effort off and running in a very short amount of time, resulting in client satisfaction  and a more successful training effort.