Stallion Oilfield Services, a leading energy service company, struggled with non-standard business practices as well as antiquated and manual systems. The company needed to change and standardize processes across all business units, establish governance, and accounting controls. A modern financial, procurement, and inventory management solution was the answer. Stallion selected Oracle ERP Cloud and partnered with Perficient to deliver the implementation in a six-month timeframe.
In our previous post, we chatted with Jason Lu, Stallion vice president, and CIO, as well as Scott Forbes, director of technology to get their overall thoughts on the migration to Oracle Cloud. In this post, we get an inside look at how they handled change during their respective implementation. They touch on the importance of change management pertaining to their transition from legacy systems to Oracle Cloud, as well as the people-side of things.
Successful change management goes beyond implementation to ensure that individuals are ready, willing, able, and stable to make a change. Moreover, what you’ll find is that anything containing the words “implementation” and “people” will require some sort of change management. Stallion’s case is no exception. Continue reading or tune in to the entire webinar by clicking here.
User Training and Headcounts
How do you handle your end-user training? Was there a change management team involved?
[Stallion] We treated the whole Organizational Change Management (OCM) piece as one bucket. Even though we invested heavily in it, I think one lesson learned is that we could have invested more. And I don’t say that because we feel that the project didn’t go well. It could have potentially gone even better. We have an internal training team, and we leveraged that internal training team. We also leveraged Perficient. We had constant communications. We had change management from launch.
We had communications, we had printed flyers, and we had multiple training sessions in advance of launch with the assistance of Perficient. Then we adopted additional training with the help of Perficient a “train the trainer” approach where we selected field and operational users from around the company that were handpicked as super users with specialized expertise in their particular area or region. We had a learning and development team that has been helping us with webinars and sometimes a roadshow. It was a multifaceted, multipronged approach. On day one through the first two or three weeks, we had a hotline that was constantly open with Perficient for people to dial in at any time to answer questions to guide our end users through the first day jitters.
Did you need to increase headcount? Where skills identified as gaps or added?
[Stallion] We did increase headcount by one. We hired a solutions architect. A lot of the folks that were doing tier level-two support for our legacy applications as they were members of the project team during rollout, picked up the Oracle Cloud support rather easily.
I’d say 70-80% of the common issues have to do with fat finger keystroke error/user error and those are being resolved by the legacy team. From a BI reporting perspective, we did not have to increase headcount whatsoever from where we were prior to the project. We hired one additional headcount that had deep knowledge and that’s an investment in the future. Although we love working with Perficient, they’ve taught us to fish and we wanted to be able to fish.
We did hire a project manager to run the project. It was essential to having someone who’s very experienced to that. Your organization may already have that and then you’re good, but that was essential. An assertive and highly experienced project manager that has a demonstrable success record is critical for this type of implementation. It’s as true with EBS and I still say it’s true with any large scale implementation, let alone an ERP implementation. The individual was not hired specifically for this project. It was rather because we are embarking on a multiyear roadmap of transforming our IT organization.
Stay tuned for Part 3 in the coming week on addressing project-based issues and challenges as we continue to tell the Stallion success story with Oracle Cloud.
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