LGSS

LGSS, one of the largest public sector shared services organisations in the UK, chose Optimum as its end-user training partner to implement an ERP Gold solution using the Unit4 Business World (Agresso) system.

LGSS was set up as a joint committee in 2010 by Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire County Councils, with Milton Keynes Council joining in 2016. LGSS provides IT, Finance, Revenue and Benefits, Legal, Procurement, Human Resources, and Payroll services to over 10 clients including councils and customers in the NHS, adult care, housing association, and school sectors. Their new ERP system was introduced to deliver multi-million-pound savings in response to public sector funding cuts while improving the efficiency of its services in the face of growing demand.

Optimum was delighted to be a partner in this major ERP implementation. Around 12,000 end users across a number of sites migrated from Oracle to Unit4 Business World Milestone 5 across a three-phase deployment programme, which involved extensive changes including a new look and feel, chart of accounts, accounting structure, and workflow system. Effective, role-based end-user training was critical to the success of the implementation. The overall programme involved devising a comprehensive training plan, as well as addressing change management issues.

As a specialist ERP user-training consultancy, Optimum was engaged to design and develop a training plan to cover all the service areas, including Transactions, Finance, Business Systems, HR Professional Services, Employee Self Service, and Manager Self Service. Bespoke, job-specific lesson plans and training courses were created, together will a full suite of supporting reference materials.

Training delivery was logistically challenging, so LGSS asked Optimum to deliver all classroom training for the Transactions, Finance, and HR Professional Services teams. For some modules with smaller audiences, a majority of the user base was involved in user acceptance testing, so the audience was already familiar with the system. Optimum developed a suite of documentation-only modules, as a full training programme was not recommended for such audiences. LGSS felt that some audiences, including the Financial Assessments and Client Funds teams, would benefit from classroom delivery, which Optimum was happy to provide.

The new LGSS ERP Gold solution was then made available for other customers. LGSS experts from the Learning and Development team and the HR/Finance super-user internal teams sat in on the first of each session provided by Optimum, so they could deliver subsequent sessions to support new users. LGSS have since continued to adapt and update the training programme in line with enhancements to the system.

Joanne Harrison, Optimum’s sales director, said “We were delighted to be a partner in this major ERP implementation. LGSS had very high expectations of its new system and getting the user training absolutely right was key to actually achieving the savings and efficiencies.”