Sage News and Discussion

Have anyone sent a customer to Irvine for classroom training? I have a customer who is interested in classes and when I navigate to SageU and try to search on Irvine classes I only find 3 and they are all ERP X3. I am not real keen on sending customers to partner training centers because my experience in the past has been that those are mostly used as a loss leader to attract orphan/ROR type work.

We've used Virtual Classroom sessions for SalesLogix and HRMS. Very good. Really no need to go in person to most product training anymore.

I tell you I'm whiffing right across the board. On-site Irvine courses related to Sage 100 ERP? None. Real time learning related to Inventory. None. Most of what they have is ""what's new"".

Haven't yet finished wading through the courses but it looks like anytime (pre-recorded) learning is about all that is left. It's not that bad provided the customer is disciplined to sit through the material. And it probably saves them a few thousand dollars in travel, etc. Still it was an eye opener to learn that on-site courses have apparently gone the way of the record player and VHS tapes...

I've never been a fan of the standard training courses they offered anyway. Way too general to be satisfying. I don't think many will miss their demise. We do training, but only focused on solving particular operational challenges. We are focusing the training around Standard Operating Procedures that the customer develops. We provide a general SOP for the area 1st, and we work with the customer to taylor it to their needs. We use the Anytime courses as the basement of our 3-option approach.

Wayne, the group has certified trainers as members who I am sure would be happy assist you with developing a curriculum course of action.

I'm dealing with a customer who I believe has bigger issues - mostly not devoting time to implementation/upgrades. I would like to be entirely out of the line of fire because I've already pinpointed that it's largely a people problem.

I'd interested in hearing how you tell the customer it's a people problem, Wayne.

When one of the people is the owner's son. Those are no win.

So who wants the training, the owner or the owner's son?

The real issue (the people problem) is this is a company on 4.05 with many custom enhancements from a partner many years ago who seemed to fix most missing features by coding them on the run. They appeared to send in someone who was good with Crystal - and that person would create a Crystal Report. Then the next time someone was on site who did not know Crystal so they'd create a report in Providex and hard code it to the menu. Etc. So there are many custom tweaks - none documented. In my opinion most of these the company likely doesn't even know why they have these procedures but are following along because they carried them over from some broken system MAS replaced in the first place. So the game plan is to upgrade. I've told them do a test setup , convert then see if they can live with the unmodified MAS. This is a great strategy for most companies except this one does not follow through and do any checking. To which I told them if they go through and upgrade without verifying that the enhancements we know we've removed are ok to be removed they stand an exceptionally high risk of having to roll back their upgrade. They feel that this will all be overcome with some additional training. There's more to this and it's been a three to four months set of back and forth largely punctuated by waiting weeks and weeks for responses to most any requests.

Expect an emergency call 1 day before you're ready to depart for your summer vacation.

@WayneSchulz - I agree with the approach of ditching the customizations if possible. Reports are one thing, but providex code is another unless it is a product supported by a Master VAR (or a 90 Minds member who you know isn't going anywhere ""MAYBE""). I also agree with @JerryNorman with a 3 Tier approach. Most of our ""classroom training"" has been onsite with a specific customer tailored to their specific business processes. We do periodically offer training in our offices on generic functions such as reporting, customization, etc. that are usually more for power users than the average end user. We highly recommend computer based training as a good start for brand new employees or when we use our ""Start & Grow"" approach. If they don't make the effort to do the training, then we have covered our proverbial A's that they were not prepared to learn.

Unless their enhancements were due to them not knowing the system, I don't see how additional training is going to overcome the removal of customizations. I had a similar situation many years ago and did exactly what you propose - installed an enhancement-free version, made minimal customizations for those things they absolutely had to have, did some training to overcome the fear of living without said enhancements, and eventually, went live. They have been happy campers ever since. I might add that training will almost ALWAYS yield some benefit they had no idea was available to them.

Totally awesome strategy for overcoming customer objections. A proof of concept. Have you been reading the same books as John Shaver?

A PAID POC is the totally awesome strategy, as I am sure it was inferred, assumed ...

Some customer organizations just can't get their act together for testing. It's cultural, flowing from the top. One way that can combat this is to structure ""events"" for them to focus on. The idea is to walk them down the path of discovering what native Sage 100 2013 will do. A series of half-day sessions, on-site or virtual, focused on a class of processes. So, one could be quote-to-invoice process. Use demo or their data as test bed (different prices), and have their senior clerks in that process on the session. Have them drive most of the time, walking through what do. It will not be smooth, but it will be once you figure out their details. If I were stuck with this problem, I would first figure out a couple key financial drivers for the deal --- $$$ why they need to upgrade. and get the owner to agree my estimate is close to reality. Otherwise the whole exercise becomes ""optional"" to everybody else. Also, you said you have weeks to get responses. We've started adding response-time bombs in our SOW. We throw something over the fence to them, and if we don't hear back in 3 days it is approved; changes after that are $xxx each. Gets their attention.

@WayneSchulz - we are an authorized training center and offer the classes that Irvine never schedules any more. I know the fears of sending a customer to another partner aren't unfounded but we do refer anyone attending back to their partner when any discussion of continued service arises. In some cases we have made calls to the partners to try and clarify what we understand the problems are after spending time in the classroom. I won't lie - we've picked up customers in the past but it is only when they aren't willing to continue pursuing the relationship with their partner. We don't require a minimum number of seats to host a class and because it is our classroom space, we can be flexible in our scheduling. Most partners don't want to spend their time with this so we keep at it so they don't have to. Works well for us.

On that note. i think these companies should do embed their 'anytime training' linked to the built in help. Say you are in AP Voucher entry, you should be able to go to Help>Video Training and see a 10 minute snip on how that works. In bite size pieces recorded training works and Sage could & should be able to charge for this option... Just my humble opinion