Problem Solving in Training Programs

I. Introduction

Orange Electric is the leading electrical manufacturing company in Sri Lanka with commanding market share of more than 70 % in Electrical Switches & sockets market. They are well known for high quality of their products both domestically and internationally.

The company has three state of the art manufacturing plants which manufacture electrical switches, sockets, low voltage circuit breakers and cables. The head office is located at Maharagama and the company has a distribution network which has spread throughout the island. Each of these distribution points, offices and factories are interconnected via a VPN (Virtual Private Network).

Orange Electric is one of the early set of companies to move in to implementing an ERP system in Sri Lanka in year 1999. With the change of business processes the company management has decided to upgrade the system with new functionalities. This was done after analyzing new requirements and future opportunities.

II. Recognizing the problem

There were numerous irregular behaviors observed in the organization after the migration to the new system. Most of those observations were directly related to the business process of the company.

• Daily productivity reduced

It has been identified that after implementing the system there was no delay in physical production of goods. However there is a significant delay in recording the information in the system it terms of

- Entering material issues / receipts

- Production order completing

- Reporting operations

Due to this although the produced goods are there in the warehouses company couldn’t release those to customers using the system, hence manual systems needed to be used which lead to a serious drop in productivity.

• Day to day activities got delayed

o Supplier Payments

o Financial statements

o Purchase receipts

o Invoicing

• Customer complaints increased (internal & external)

Most of the customers and partners complained about the delay in delivery of orders and payments. This was happened due to the delay in recording particular transactions in the system.

• Cultural issues started to arise

o Inter departmental conflicts

Departments are having their own schedules and goals. Due to the delays occur in the process each department started blaming others. Moreover most departments were in a huge conflict with the IT department for implementing such a complex system.

o De-motivation

The staff seems to be de motivated by the system change and most of them still wanted use the old system. Some of the employees complained that they are de motivated because of the complexity of the new system.

III. Define the problem

1. Employees are not attending to training programs

While analyzing above mentioned issues at Orange Electric we have found out that main reason for almost all issues is that end users have not properly been trained on the new system. This lack of training has been continuingly creating more and more problems in the office environment.

2. How did we found out that this is the problem?

In order to identify that lack of training is the problem for all the issues, we have carried out a small research which consisted of observation and interviewing. In the interview we have forwarded some simple questions (Appendix I).

The data collection and observation was done on selected random samples of each department. For this initial research we have selected a random sample size from each focused group as this supposed to be an abstract level of research carried out to identify the cause for the problem. The focused groups were selected from Stores / Warehouse, CR department, Finance department, IT department and top level management. The gathered results were analyzed further and it has been identified that during the period of ERP system implementation at Orange Electric there was a general tendency of users not attending to training programs.

Having identified the symptoms we carried out series