Woolworths - Finance Systems Refresh

Cubic Consulting was engaged by Woolworths to deliver an effective and sustainable education solution to support the implementation mySAP v4.7 for the Finance Systems Refresh project.

The scope of this project was across the Woolworths enterprise and included Supermarkets Operations, Buying & Marketing, Big W Division, Shared Service Financial Control, Shared Service Transaction Processing Centre, Corporate Finance, Design-Construction-Maintenance Division, Property Group, IT Group, Petrol Division (including Caltex JV), Liquor Division, Group Procurement, and e-business divisions.

Key Objectives

Woolworths required a tightly managed approach to training in order to deliver an effective and sustainable solution. With limited budget, the solution needed to address the disparate needs of a diverse target audience group. The training audience encompassed those with advanced finance skills to simple transaction processing skills. There was also a wide audience of non-finance roles that required training, including marketing, buyers, operations, and IT.

Some of the key objectives of the training effort included:

* Creating a flexible solution suitable for addressing the highly varied needs of the target audience
* Ensuring the approach to materials development and training delivery recognised the cultural differences between business divisions
* Establishing a flexible project team structure mapped to project phases, minimising costs
* Achieve a level of staff competency (skills, knowledge, confidence) to minimise disruption to business activity during the transition to a production environment
* Accelerate employee adoption of the new business process and system environment Adhere to Woolworths Learning and Development training standards and practices

Approach

The project was structured in six phases.

1. Training Strategy and Analysis

The Training Manager conducted a thorough review of the original training strategy in conjunction with key representatives from the business divisions. Once approved by the project control group, this strategy set the baseline for project planning and budgeting, including development approach, resource requirements, deployment plans, and technical requirements.

2. Validation of Business Process Procedures

Training team lead consultants partnered with subject matter experts to review, update and standardise the Business Process Procedure (BPP) documents. These documents were the primary business process and system configuration inputs required to support the development of reference based training materials. This phase of the project was critical to ensuring close liaison between the training team and process / development teams.

3. Curriculum Development

The training solution was based on an instructor-led approach using role based materials. The training design also stipulated reference to the Business Process Procedures published in the online SAP Knowledge Centre. A key focus of this phase was to match the 1,200 potential SAP users to pre-defined SAP roles. From this process the detailed curriculum design was confirmed, specifying course content, duration, audience and logistics requirements. The solution consisted of:
  • 52 reference based Instructor-Led training courses
  • Detailed SAP training client environment (1 master client, 10 delivery clients, an enquiries client and a BW training client)
  • Help cards
  • Knowledge Centre (self-service support, intranet-based, environment designed for use in the training classroom and at the desktop)

4. Training Pilots

A seven week training pilot was delivered to key finance representatives, process specialists and all trainers to fully test 40 of the training modules. This provided a final opportunity for fine-tuning of courses prior to the scheduled deployment. A comprehensive Train-the-Trainer was also delivered to 30 trainers.

5. Training Delivery

Training delivery consisted of a core training team of trainers from Cubic Consulting, Woolworths and independent training specialists. There were also 21 business trainers delivering BW courses. Over the seven week delivery window 1,200 participants attended more than 3,000 training days across five states. This was co-ordinated by a central training scheduling team.

6. Post go-live support

At the conclusion of the formal training process the training team members transitioned to a SAP On-site Support role, deployed across seven key business units. The function of this role was to consolidate skills and knowledge with ad-hoc training, desktop support and additional formal training for those missed during first round or for those who required further assistance.

Outcomes

Key statistics and outcomes of this project:
  • 88 distinct SAP roles trained
  • SAP scope included FI/CO, CO-PA, EC-CS, AA, PS, IM, MM, BW
  • A total of 29 days training courseware was developed
  • 1,200 training participants across a wide variety of business divisions and locations
  • 3,000 training days delivered across 11 sites
  • A total requirement peak of 44 trainers
  • 95% approval rating of all aspects of the training (an unprecedented success rate verified by an independent survey group)
  • 800 SAP system tasks & 200 business procedures covered in the education solution scope.
 

Contact

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