POST-IMPLEMENTATION USABILITY OF ERP TRAINING MANUALS: THE USER'S PERSPECTIVE

PROBLEMATIC ERP IMPLEMENTATIONS are often associated with inadequate user training (Brown and Vessey, 2003; Roberts et al., 2003; Scott and Vessey, 2002). In a recent study of 30 manufacturing firms, user training was their top ERP problem (Duplaga and Astani, 2003). Training is consistently an under-budgeted item and is often the first item cut in the budget (Slater, 1998), despite Gartner's finding that each hour of effective training is worth five hours to the organization because well-trained users (1) reach the required skill level in less than a quarter of the time, (2) require less assistance from peers and help desks, and (3) spend less time correcting errors (Aldrich, 2000). Organizations spend as much as 50 percent (Davenport 2000) to as little as 5 percent of their ERP project budget on training (Wheatley 2000). Gartner research asserts that companies allocating less than 13 percent of project costs to training are three times more likely to have their ERP projects fall short of business and project goals compared with companies that spend 17 percent or more on training (Aldrich, 2000; Burleson, 2001).