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Reily Foods Company
[00:00] My name is Paul Forney. I’m the VP of Finance and IT at Reily Foods. So, I run both the finance department and the IT department for our company. Reily Foods is a food and beverage manufacturer based in New Orleans, Louisiana, founded in 1902, mainly produce coffee, tea mayo, but also distribute some other things such as hot sauce, flour, and chili.
[00:29] We are currently in AX09 and we decided to upgrade to D365, the cloud environment. We are leveraging mainly ISVs, trying to use out of the box functionality for D365.
[00:38] I’m Renee LaCour. I’m the Associate Director of process improvement and data analytics at Reily Foods, and then in terms of the D365 implementation, I’m the overall project manager. I think one of the largest training challenges that we had prior to the restart of our implementation project was that we didn’t really do training. So the philosophy at that time was really take our current business processes and make the system work for us rather than reevaluating our business processes to fit industry standard and best practices.
[01:07] The platform (pay-as-you-go) makes it really easy. The first thing to note is you don’t have to put your whole organization in it. They don’t all have to be members and active subscribers all at once. So we were able to go in phases of, I think around 20 to 25 people at a time, where we took our lead D365 team through it, let them complete it. Then went maybe to more of the subject matter experts and now we’re in the phase where we’re letting the end users get up to speed.
[01:34] So the micro-courses let everybody learn as they see fit or the best way that they can. If you wanna do one or two courses because you have 10 minutes and you just wanna knock one or two out, you can. If you wanna do a whole module at one time and maybe you have an hour or a lunch break or something like that, you can do the, you know, the 10 courses in one module and get it all done at one time so you don’t forget. But everything is flexible and lets you cater it to that individual’s needs.
[02:05] Learning paths make it really easy for us to delegate or attach trainings to each individual. So if you have an AP team, you know exactly what learning path that you should give them. At a smaller company like ours, a lot of people have hybrid roles. So it made it real easy that if they crossed into AR and AP, you could give them both. If it was somebody that may be a manager that needed to know all of them, you knew that whatever the people underneath them were doing to, to assign to them.
[02:36] So the learning paths made it extremely easy to not have to go through and figure out exactly what you should assign to them or just let people get in the system and say, go click on the ones that make sense to you. We knew exactly what they needed to accomplish and what they needed to learn.
[02:51] I think the assessments were definitely beneficial. I know a handful of our team members might have missed a question or two and would have to go back and rewatch it just to help make sure that it reinforces core concepts for everyone. It also helped us make sure that we’re retaining that information over time and having some of those assessments midway through those learning paths after a few micro courses and then at the end of the learning path that kind of consumes all of that information that you’ve learned were extremely beneficial.
[03:17] The dashboards were extremely beneficial, at least from a project management and team lead standpoint for myself. So I was able to create custom dashboards and reports within Item by Item that then I set up subscriptions to send to myself every day at 9:00 AM. So I could see progress at our teams making throughout the training process. We also could see the last time that the user logged in or their progress or overall assessment scores for the learning path, which was very beneficial to make sure that our team’s actually making progress. We were also able to identify some team members that weren’t logging in for two or three months that should have been completing those trainings. And we were able to address those as needed. But it really provided a lot of information for us to really monitor the progress on training and make sure that our teams truly retaining that information.
[04:03] Gamification helped us a lot. We have a very competitive organization, especially when we were doing the leads and the SMEs. They were always looking at the leaderboard, their KPIs. If somebody was ahead of them, they would work on the weekends to do the trainings to make sure they were in the lead. By the time Monday rolled around, we did give them small prizes and a raffle to make it, you know, a little bit more fun and give them a reward. And it also allowed us to identify some superstars that we may not have been aware of that were hidden in our organization that wanted to learn more, asked for more, even more than they were given and completed it extremely quickly, and were eager to learn.
[04:45] The pay-as-you-go model is ideal. To be honest, if it wasn’t available, we may have never started this endeavor with Item by Item. So it allowed us to know, okay, we’re gonna do 20 users in the first phase and then the next phase we have 20, but maybe in the following phase we don’t have 20 while we’re finishing up, you know, certain parts of the implementation and maybe it’s 10. So it allowed us to kind of be dynamic and be adapting to where we were in the project without saying we need to have all a hundred in there from start to finish, which helped us control costs for sure.
[05:22] Our end users founds the out of the box courses were very beneficial, especially because it was specific to their individual roles. So we were able to identify an AP analyst needs to have these specific learning paths assigned to them and it was very relatable to their jobs. So even before we started concept overviews with our implementation partner, it gave our team really a sense of the out of the box functionality as it relates to them and they’re able to pace it as they go themselves. So whether that would be, you know, scheduling an hour each week or an hour each day to complete the trainings, it made it more flexible for our team to complete them.
[05:59] The overall relationship with Item by Item has been fantastic. Having check-ins every two to three weeks with the team to make sure that if we’re addressing any questions around licensing or any new trainings that are released, it was great to have those conversations and just brief check-ins every few weeks to make sure that all of our training needs are being addressed.
[06:20] I think having a phased approach with training has definitely been a big win for us. That’s something I would recommend to other customers as well. Making sure that you’re not training all your team members all at once. You wanna make sure that your core team understands that functionality in case any of your downstream team members have questions that maybe aren’t addressed in a training or that they don’t know where to find a specific training or a lesson regarding what they need to look at.
[06:47] The top things I would tell a customer to focus on when they were starting their training was to start early and earlier than they think they need to. So we started I think two or three months before we really ever started the project, but everybody was up to speed and you underestimate how much time it actually takes you to train entirely, you know, like train appropriately. So start early. I would say also keep it consistent and keep it standardized for everyone because everybody’s talking on the same page. When you finally get in those conversations with your implementation partner, everybody’s using the same vocabulary, they have the same experience, they have all clicked the same buttons and navigated through the same windows. So I would say, you know, start early consistency and standardization or the the top three things.
[07:31] I would a 100% recommend IBI to other companies that are, even if they’re already live in the environment or planning to go live. It greatly helped our organization, got everybody ready, prepared, and educated everybody so that we were on the same page. And with all the features and the KPIs as everybody loves these days, made it really easy for a manager and for the employees to do everything they needed to do and make sure we did it right.
Inolex
[00:00] My name is Eric Davis. I am the Senior Business Systems Director at Inolex. I am responsible for the IT operations, application development, and cybersecurity.
[00:08] Inolex is a manufacturing company responsible for making ingredients for the personal care product industry. We have a main office in Philadelphia devoted to R&D and administration, and we have a flagship manufacturing location in Charlotte, North Carolina.
[00:26] Inolex uses Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain. So we have a team of people working on both the finance operations using AP and AR. We have supply chain with inventory management, master planning, and many of our manufacturing routing and supply chain operations.
[00:46] The training challenges that Inolex faced were primarily around the diverse expertise required in many of the areas of both the industry specific actions and the details of the application. So, with a small IT group, we were challenged from a resource standpoint and we were looking for ways in which we could reach out and be able to provide expertise and training in the areas of both supply chain and finance to help our extended teams.
[01:17] My name is Anthony Bracco and I am a business analyst for my company Inolex.
[01:23] I think the micro courses are great. Our users really enjoy it and appreciate it because they can tailor it into their busy schedule. That is always the pushback and challenge that we have for any type of training is how do they find the time, how can they fit this in their schedule. So the micro courses allow them to make it work for them on that given day. So far it has been working great both from my side as an administrator and the feedback we have gotten from the users.
[01:48] It (learning path) has been working great. We normally start out the users with the kind of core fundamental navigating Dynamics and then depending on whatever department they are in, we focus in on those learning paths that are relevant to their work. It has been great. It has been helpful as an administrator as well to remember where we are. I am not needing to keep track of too many different learning paths and it has made it easier also if there is a user who is perhaps more advanced and they are going to maybe get a little bit ahead from the rest of the group. It is easy to find that learning path that’s still in their general area of Dynamics, but to assign that to them additionally.
[02:28] The assessments have worked very well for us. One of the department’s managers also used the assessments a little bit differently and it worked out very well for her group. Basically what we did is had her group begin by taking assessment even before any of the micro courses and based on that kind of placed them in kind of beginner, intermediate, advanced learning paths based on their results from the assessment.
[02:59] With the IT team at Inolex working with business departments, the metrics (dashboards) that the training provided allowed us to have constructive conversations with that business process owner. So the business process owner could talk to their team and encourage training where it is lacking or we can talk about other training that may be needed if it was being missed.
[03:19] The pay-as-you-go model allows a structured and accountable role in training. It forces us to be more intentional in our training so that we are tracking costs and making sure that we are being intentional on where training is being used. The pay-as-you-go model also allows us to scale up and scale back depending on what projects are actually being active in the organization without having to be committed to long-term contracts and not getting value out of that.
[03:51] Biggest positive feedback that I’ve received from especially the department leaders has been: There is features and dynamics that we are not currently using in our business processes and it has sparked some ideas for them. Like, Hey, we really should be using this. A very simple one is cases. Right now, we are not utilizing cases in Dynamics right now and our customer service team, through their training, learning how cases work (a very simple function), they said we should totally be using this. And that is one of the things we are going to be looking to do probably this year still.
[04:30] One of the things that we are going to actually start doing with the Item by Item curriculum is we are going to start having it as part of our onboarding process. So far that has been the biggest strength for us personally. We can go much more advanced I think, than we are currently going, but for right now, especially for new employees, it has been fantastic and we are going to begin using it as part of our company’s onboarding process if that role is not Dynamics at all.
[05:01] So the out-of-the-box training aligns with the way that Inolex rolls out Dynamics. We try to stay in the box as best we can for the deployment, and we drive our customers to use those processes so that we can get the expected outcomes. We encourage our team members to play and find efficient ways to use the product, but starting users out with the certified best process usually gives the best experience for our team.
[05:31] I would definitely recommend IBI training to any other company engaging in the Dynamics platform. It is definitely a tool that can be picked up quickly and be utilized by teams to upskill their teams so that they’re ready for the next Dynamic challenge that they have.
The Heico Companies
[00:00] I’m Stephanie Lavinskas and I am the Director of Organizational Change Management for the Heico Companies. The Heico Companies is a holding company based out of Chicago. We have four distinct groups with various different operating companies operating globally all around the world. The Heico companies has decided to utilize D365 to create some uniform platforms amongst all of our companies to help with efficiencies and reporting.
[00:23] The biggest training challenge that we faced is the lack of time. People don’t have time throughout the project to learn, to then to train, to learn how to be trainers. And so we’ve found that people feel very overwhelmed and don’t really know where to start or where to what to do. In the past, we have been following more of the Train-the-trainer approach. We’ve been using the project team to be able to learn the system and then train end users come, end user training and UAT. Because of the bandwidth of the project team, we decided to look outwards and create more of a blended learning approach where knowing that not in-classroom training is always the best way to go, wanting different opportunities and different resources for our team.
[01:04] So as a part of the blended approach, we were looking for something that provided online training and by coming to Summit and finding IBI training, we partnered with them to incorporate their training into our curriculum to allow people to have more self-paced opportunities for, for learning.
[01:22] We took a training strategy where we created a blended curriculum that went over two months. We incorporated the IBI platform in the first month to really allow people to have that one-on-one basic training, and in the second month to really dive deep into their functional roles to understand well how their roles work within the system, and also cross-functionally how other roles kind of integrate into their own.
[01:47] The partnership build with IBI has been fantastic. I feel as though I’m never left on my own. I always have the right resources and coaching and conversations that’s needed to really make this platform work for our company. Our team has loved it. I think what they love the most is that they (micro-courses) are so small that they can do so many in a short period of time and it makes them feel accomplished. They can do one in between meetings if they need and if they need to refer back to something. It’s not having to go through so many minutes and so many slides. It’s very quick, it’s very easy and it’s easy to digest.
[02:18] It (learning path) allows our learners to be focused, which is what people need at this time. There’s so many things that are coming at them at the same time. So to be able to kind of see that continuum of their role where every module builds on top of the one before and you can see what you need to see at the right time so you’re not overwhelmed with all of the information. And people appreciated the fact that they went into the portal and they saw their role, so they felt more connected to it, but then they knew that they had access to everything else if they needed, but they at least went in and saw that curated content.
[02:50] I think the assessments were actually key in the sense that we were not limiting them if they didn’t pass, if they didn’t pass, they were just provided with a little bit more context and were allowed to take the test over again. We didn’t create any shame in not passing a test. It really allowed them to learn at their own pace. It allowed them to go back to understand why they made the mistakes and what they were and learn from them in a different way. And I think people really appreciated that.
[03:18] I was able to go in there (dashboards) and see immediately who has taken training, who has not, how people were doing. And it was also very easy for me to train the leads within the company to be able to understand and read. And the biggest part was when we had steering committee meetings, we were able to very easily cut and paste the information. We didn’t have to go into any kind of data analytics to be able to do that.
[03:40] It created more understanding and confidence within our team. You could definitely feel it in any of the design sessions with the implementation partners, where the people who went through the training had a larger voice and were able to speak up about different processes and be part of the conversation instead of sitting back and just listening.
[03:59] They have loved it. They’re very scared that I’m going to take it away, and I keep reminding them that they have it throughout the whole project and as long as they need it. And so the feedback has been extremely positive. One of our BPOs said that she couldn’t believe how user-friendly it was. She was nervous. The experience that we had in the past of online training was very compliance-based very heavy. And that was her expectation going in. And when she did a few courses through the IBI platform, she realized that it was very light, it was very airy, it was very easy, and she felt more comfortable to go in day after day.
[04:36] Start training early. Early, and often before the project even starts. Gain that knowledge level, that knowledge base of your project team so that they can be advocates for your business in every conversation that they have throughout this process. And make it continuous, make it fun. Make sure that it’s not stagnant, and make sure that you’re meeting people where they are, that you’re meeting their needs, and that you’re not providing them with too much information at once. That everything is just in time.
[05:05] I would 100% recommend the IBI platform. If you are going through an implementation, it allows your people to have a sense of autonomy in their learning process, which as adults is something that we all crave. And it also allows for you to have the sense of security for people going through the process that you can see how they’re doing, see how they’re feeling, and create a lot of touch points to be able to understand how people are feeling consistently throughout the project.
Vector Security
[00:27] My name is Bryan Finney. I am the Vice President of IT at Vector Security. I’ve been with the organization for two years. I’ve worked in many different industries, such as retail, distribution, logistics, and technology companies. And now I’m really enjoying my time at Vector Security and running a business transformation initiative.
[00:47] Vector Security has been around for 50 years. We are a very diverse organization from residential security systems, small commercial, large national accounts, and we service our customers and making sure everybody is safe. And at the end of the day, you know, this organization has organically grown over time, and we have many different processes, many different technologies, some legacy systems that have been around for, 30 years. So now we’re in the middle of a business transformation initiative that will transform our business. We’re calling it Reimagine Vector Security.
[01:22] Me coming in the organization, I’ve experienced transformations like this at different scales, and training is important in the beginning of what you’re looking at doing. And so I thought about it personally in the beginning of how to get our subject matter experts that are helping drive this from a business process perspective to get them comfortable with the platform. So we did some initial training with what we call our project steering committee, which was 15 unique individuals within the organization. Pulled out from their core job to focus a hundred percent on business transformation.
[01:54] And then we continued that journey into getting additional folks as they come part of our different sprints and digging into different business topics and areas. If it was within F&O within CE, within Field Service, within Sales. As we look at that specialized skill sets, we had to pull in and actually start continually training people as we went through this transformation.
[02:15] So Item by Item provided a baseline training for the organization on how to use the platforms. Once we actually have that baseline training, now we can actually leverage the business requirements on how to specialize ourselves and add that next layer on top of that. So that is the next phase of this is to really now look at, okay, what’s unique based off of what is out of the box from D365.
[02:37] I think the importance of that initial training is to give people a comfort space when something new is coming. Change is tough. Everybody is used to you doing it their own way. You know, if I am a technician in the field, I’m used to using a piece of paper for most of our organization. So knowing what’s gonna be coming, knowing what good looks like is definitely a good way to create that foundational understanding of what it means to transform this organization.
[03:06] Lessons learned in our business transformation project here, or this leg of the journey, it is a journey. It’s a continuum. It is making sure that you encourage a training platform for the teams in the beginning. Because if you don’t, then you don’t know what good looks like. You don’t know what out of the box should be to minimize and lower some of our costs. And you’re just thinking about, how did I do it today? I wanna do it the same way tomorrow. But the way you did it today may not be as effective and efficient.
[03:37] So if you don’t have that basic understanding of the platform you’re putting in place, in this case, D365, and having that training upfront is something that’s very important for us. Lessons learned. We should entrain more people, we should encourage them to have some type of continual training. As we reimagined our organization through effective communications is introduced continual training for our end users.
[04:00] I would recommend IBI to really help come in and set a foundation for the organization on how to use Dynamics 365. The content is at the right level. It helps you. It is easy to use and it’s really consumable by our team members, and I think a continual partnership with them is something that we’re looking at as well to see how we can actually leverage that content in our journey
[04:27] And this journey, we’re about to go live in 2024 and we’ll have to continuously change to evolve the organization as we continue to grow. And IBI definitely could be a partner with us for the long term.
[04:39] I’m Heather Armitage. I’m the Director of training and development for Vector Security. I joined Vector Security in July of last year because I was very excited about the transformation journey that they were beginning. I think about where they’re starting to, where they’re going and how they’re implementing different things like a training team to make sure that the team is super successful in this implementation, and that’s really where I’ve come from.
[05:04] Item by item provided their online suite of courses for both CE and F&O to our user groups who are participating in our design sprints. Item by Item was crucial to our teams in readying themselves to be active participants in the design sprints. We found that people who were joining the design sprints prior to Item by Item really had little to no working knowledge of what D365 could do. They knew what they were doing today, but they didn’t know what they needed, what the system could do for them. So once we implemented Item by Item, we found that they were more participative and that they had really great conversations about the future and not necessarily things that were grounded in the past.
[05:48] So the short videos that Item by Item offers were really valuable to our business. We know that learners today don’t have the long attention span that they’re looking for tidbits of information and things that are really relevant to the work that they’re going to do. So, we found a lot of value in the small videos.
[06:06] Item by item did a great job of helping us to organize the learning paths to make them valuable to the individual user. We were able to provide learning for user types and that really helped us to be successful in the Item by Item rollout.
[06:20] So while our training was voluntary, we were able to go in, or I was able to go in and see dashboards that helped me understand who was the most engaged, where people were spending the most amount of time. And really, when we think about the assessments, what they were getting out of the learning from Item by Item.
[06:38] The learners who use the IBI platform, we’re actually really excited about it. We found that even though the training was not mandatory, we had thousands of courses taken. And the feedback was really good that it gave them the right training that they wished they had it a little bit earlier, but really it helped to prepare them for things that were to come.
[06:59] I can’t say enough good things about my experience working with Item by Item. The consultation was great. The focus on our specific business needs was very good. And then the support that we got when I wasn’t sure how to do something, or even if I needed help thinking about something a little bit differently, Item by Item was really there for me.
[07:20] I would absolutely recommend Item by Item to other people who are looking for online training for their users. The way that the training is cataloged, the information that is within, the quickness of the videos, the assessments, the dashboards, all were really helpful to our team when we think about transformation.
Millcraft
[00:34] My name is Mike Branch. I am the CIO for Millcraft. We are a hundred year old paper distribution company based out of Cleveland, Ohio. D365 for Millcraft was just kind of the vital next step. We have been through multiple implementations between AX 4, AX 12. It has positioned us to grow the business to where we have it today, and D365 is the vital next step to put us on a platform for continuous improvement.
[01:05] The importance of D365 to Millcraft is that foundation for continuous improvement into a system that we know can grow with us, and we can grow with it. It positions us to integrate our data and analytics which we’ve painstakingly integrated over the years into a highly customized ERP. And it allows us to tie in our modern platform of e-commerce as well.
[01:39] Training for D365 probably came a little late in our planning process. We were guided by our partner. It was a wonderful partner, but nobody’s perfect. And, their training and education of our system was a little bit late in the cadence of their project plan. So, it became very clear early on in our project that we had missed the opportunity to train and educate ourselves on the system prior to jumping headfirst into the implementation with our partner.
[02:10] Two years ago at Community Summit, we sat in on a session with Item by Item and one of their current clients, and heard the story about how they worked through their implementation together. It was very intriguing for us, so we stopped at the Expo later that day, and got to know Elif and her product.
[02:35] And it immediately caught our attention because of two things. Basically an all encompassing product that taught us the system from the ground up from the beginning base, and then its platform gave us a very simple assignment tool to distribute training to our vital core users and our stakeholders to dive in and start learning the system from the beginning and do it in the middle of their day jobs.
[03:05] Item by Item was vital for the stakeholders of our project. Early on trying to find the value and why we were going to spend such a large amount of money to migrate under a partner supervision, so that we know we would yield the product that we need. We had a gap of understanding where the value was coming from. We had a gap of telling our partner what we wanted.
[03:30] So jumping in and learning the base system little by little specific to each department of our stakeholders, areas of expertise, allowed us to create an as-is to-be state that helped us deliver requirements to our partner that we knew would then yield the ROI for the project in the first place.
[03:48] The individual videos in the Item by Item platform are wonderful. They are short. They are to the point. They are targeted for specific users and very easy to any kind type of learner. Whether you want to be a learner who listens and absorbs, listens and follows along in the system or watches the system alone. It catered to all of our users and we had very little objections to anybody that we onboarded into the system.
[04:16] Item by Item’s learning paths, being able to be targeted to specific users, were wonderful so that I didn’t have any subject matter experts learning about things in the system that they would not use or care about. So, they felt like we were targeting them specific to their role and what was going to be important to them moving forward into the system, and that we weren’t wasting their time, not respecting their current day jobs and their vital importance to the project.
[04:46] At the end of each learning path, they did offer assessments that we did take advantage of, and I got a lot of wonderful feedback from our users. They were assessments that yielded questions that demanded the familiarity of what you’d just been through, which were wonderful, but the system allows you to go back and revisit each training course within the learning path while you’re taking the assessment so that you can revisit the training. And our users loved that because it made them go back and really absorb what was vital to them to learn in that learning path. So, it was not a stressful thing, it was an enjoyment, and it helped them focus on truly what was going to be the most vital things that they learned out of those learning paths.
[05:27] Feedback from our users about the platform was wonderful. It gave them a short to the point tool, targeted training, and assigned curriculum that they could focus on, they knew was applicable to them in their world, and that they knew once they learned, they would be able to drive much more impact and much more value into our migration project.
[05:52] Item by Item is phenomenal to work with. Anytime we had a question, it was a quick email, a quick phone call, and there’s no problem to set up a 30-minute call to kind of coordinate. The system set up and, you know, overall implementation of their platform was super easy, almost kind of self-explanatory.
[06:12] What the best part of working with them was that we could call her with questions that says “We’re experiencing this. Is that normal? Hey, we’ve got a lot of users that are at a point where they want to dive into another section of training. Is that normal? Yes, absolutely. You’re entering kind of what we call this phase of training. You’re entering kind of this phase of the project.” So it wasn’t just a here’s how to use the platform. It was true project expertise, support at the drop of a text message, a phone call or an email.
[06:45] Item by Item is absolutely a product that should be explored by any company going through a migration or any kind of upgrade or as a tool to be utilized for new hires. So, the number one thing that we found was overall education of the system to help us map out value for our major migration.
[07:07] The other bonuses came along the way where we now had a library of training to offer to our lower level users, our new hires, and that we have a platform that will continue to evolve with us as we upgrade the system, as we stay in line with upcoming Microsoft enhancements. So, big fan of it. It was a huge help for Millcraft and recommended to anybody out there looking to dive into some training and education prior to their migration to D365.
Merit Brass
[00:33] My name is Ender Yilmaz. I am the director of IT here at Merit Brass. I am responsible for all the information technologies, networks, and ERP software. I’m also handling long-term IT strategies here at Merit with a small team.
[00:57] Merit Brass is a master distributor and also a production company. We are working on fillings, flanges, pipes, and metal products, mostly. We have a nipple production here in Cleveland, which is our headquarters also. We have four more distribution centers around the US.
[01:21] When we decided to go D365, we were already using Dynamics AX 2012 R3. ERP is a very important part of our process. We are using advanced warehouse, production shop, floor control, and basically everything within the system. So, it was about six years old. No upgrades have been done since the original project. We had multiple ISV solutions, which weren’t upgraded, and some of the ISVs were also out of business.
[02:00] We are currently live for 13 months now. We are definitely more happy compared to our previous situation. We retired most of the ISV modules. We retired our system room. Everything is on the cloud, and we are 90-95% using Microsoft Ecosystem.
[02:23] Currently, we have about 250 users. Half of them are regular system users, and the other half are warehouse and, manufacturing users. Most of our users were already on AX, so they knew the process as well, but they needed to tune up the new application. IBI helped us to speed them up into the new system very quickly, and they were in no time good resources within the project.
[03:04] We started training immediately because this is a video tool. While we were working on the data upgrade, our business users were able to start using the system with demo data. And with IBI users, when we started pulling them into the conference rooms for analysis, they already knew D365. We keep training all the users using IBI. We didn’t need to spare our project resources for that. That process was going in parallel by itself.
[03:47] So, I definitely recommend the IBI platform. It has nice learning paths on roles. So we know who will follow which videos and which learning paths to be competent in their role.
[04:09] The IBI platform has really good cost-saving options. It’s not “put in everyone within the system at the same time”. Instead of that, we put paid people from departments month to month. So, while we completed the project, everyone was trained.
[04:31] IBI is not just a tool you can use at the project phase but it’s also an essential tool for us for onboarding new users to the system. When we hire someone new after OSHA training, they go through the IBI training, which is a huge time-saving for us. When onboarding users with IBI, you don’t need to spare your other users to train them; spare that kind of resource. But they complete their training process mostly by themselves.
[05:04] I’m Birkan Ozgur. I am the credit manager of Merit Brass Company. I am in charge of the AR department, and we are responsible with credits and collections. The short videos, I think they were like really quick, and they were really to the point. They were helping individuals to go in and watch the short video and stop and go back to their actual screen and try to do exactly what they were seeing while watching on the videos.
[05:37] Because we didn’t just watch the videos. What we did was, we watched the videos and we practiced on our test system after watching the videos. Those videos were not just for training or one-time videos. We kept our employees to have access to those videos just in case for the next three or four months that if they had any issues, they could go back to those videos and watch the videos again and then perform their tasks accordingly.
[06:08] Learning paths were really helpful because the biggest challenge of any training is to understand the curriculum and understand the order of training that you have to provide. And the most beautiful thing with IBI was they were already there. The paths were all already there. And then, and as a manager, I was able to control people’s progress in their paths and in their training program.
[06:43] I was able to see their progress, and I was able to, you know, plan their further training according to their progress. I would definitely recommend IBI to other companies due to the fact that if you really would like to have a standardized training program, and if you really want your employees to be able to have access to information rather than them keep coming to you with questions, IBI is a perfect tool for that.
[07:15] It’s not only training, seeing people’s progress in training, but also learning the capabilities of the system was one of the reasons I would recommend other companies to use IBI.
[07:33] I’m Rhonda Losh, and I’m the director of customer service here at Merit Brass. I have a team of about 20 people that report to me in various functions within the company. It was very easy to log in and get started. They provided me with the listing of the modules that I would be doing, and so those were already assigned to me, so it was really easy to just click through the modules and find them and get started.
[07:59] The short videos were really quick and easy, so if I just had a few minutes of free time, I would sit down and go through those really quick. What I did when I was watching the videos is I would have two screens open, so while I was watching the video, I would also be going through the through the system at the same time to follow along. So as I was learning one thing, I was doing it on the other screen.
[08:21] I use IBI as a starter for the training. And then once they’ve gone through all the learning paths, then we’ll sit them down with an instructor for any additional questions that they may have that didn’t get answered through the videos. But all new people that get onboarded are required. It’s a requirement training to go through the videos through the IBI videos.
[08:43] I would highly recommend any new user on the IBI videos. It allows ease of use. You can use it at your own pace where you can log in and log out whenever you have free time.
[08:56] Hi, my name is Jason LeDonne. I am the corporate project manager here at Merit Brass, which means I basically oversee and help facilitate any of the ongoing projects in the company covering multiple departments and personnel.
[09:12] The way IBI was set up was, basically for us, there was two main versions. There was a learner view and an administrative view. So, you could kind of manage it and observe your team or the overall project. You could see who’s been active, who hasn’t been active. You could really see the details of what they’ve watched
[09:29] The way it’s set up with very short, succinct videos allows you to find the resources you’re looking for. They’re very focused information on the direct, topics you’re looking for. And then what’s nice is many of them have a short follow up question and answer session so you can kind of reinforce what you’ve just learned hopefully. And again, as an administrator, you can go back and see how your, your users are testing too and see if they’re actually retaining what they’re seeing as opposed to just scrolling through and clicking through the information.
[09:57] From being the manager of this project, I definitely saw a benefit to those users who use these videos. I found that they were much more independent on their own learning and were able to follow through on their own training at much more of an expedited process than some of the others were. Those who didn’t tap into this resource, we found them needing more assistance along the way, needing reinforcement, whereas those who were IBI active were much more successful in their training.
[10:25] I received feedback from multiple department users that they found these videos and resources very useful and very helpful. A lot of them like to work independently. Some folks are less apt to wanna ask for help and assistance, and they were able to use this on their own and get the information without having to ask for someone else’s help. So I did get a lot of feedback from folks who were more introverted and learners who liked this, because they were allowed to kind of run on their own pace.
[10:50] I also got feedback that they liked the question and answer follow up. It’s one thing to have the information, but another thing to kind of digest it, understand it, and, and regurgitate it back out. So, both sides, the learners felt that they were getting a benefit from them. And then the reinforcement of the videos. You had live interactive screens with the dialogue that was going on to help reinforce the visual learners as well.
[11:14] So we worked with IBI on a month to month basis with kind of active user accounts. We evaluated who we wanted to have access to. Each department came in with their own list of users who they felt needed access for training. So month to month we would update that list. Some people who we felt needed more time would extend it for additional months, maybe because of the role or because of how much training they still needed. Some folks because of the role were one month in and out with very focused attention. But we were able to tailor that on a monthly basis with IBI very easily. They were even able to tailor the new users with specific role of videos and assessments. So they were very, very cohesive with us and our month to month needs.
[11:59] There was very ease of highering and lowering of our user accounts each month with very simple dialogue that we communicated very quickly back and forth. Anytime there was a concern, if we had new users come in, in the middle of the month, we have a new employee and “hey, I know it’s the second week. Do you think we can get them in this month now?” There was never an issue with getting them in on time and having that taken care of.
[12:23] I would obviously recommend IBI to anyone out there looking for a resource for training, especially when it comes to what we did with Microsoft D 365. It was great for the project planning side. It was great for our users. It was great for the overall implementation and success of our project. But now that that’s passed, there is also a great use to tap into for new employees as they’re coming in and new projects as they come up. We are able to tailor these videos and the content to our needs through IBI, and that ease of communication’s really gonna just help us grow and foster our new employees as they come in.
DECIEM
[00:35] My name is Adele D’Silva and I’m the project manager for the D365 ERP implementation for DECIEM. So, we implemented this project across multiple divisions and legal entities globally across the world and I was the business project manager working with the vendor of record representing this.
[01:00] So DECIEM is a leading cosmetics brand which is based out of Canada. We also have different organizations or different entities in the USA, Canada, Australia, the UK, and a growing market around the world.
[01:20] We have been live on D365 for Finance since November 2020 and also manufacturing, quality, and supply chain ever since December 2021 with an integrated environment of over 700 team members across four divisions and 14 individual units, five countries, eight warehouses, and distribution centers, as well as multiple third-party vendors.
[01:50] The benefit that D365 brings to our organization has been establishing a single system of record for inventory, production, e-commerce, distribution centers, and finance.
[02:06] This implementation would have been much more difficult if we didn’t have the IBI platform and IBI provided that early conceptual knowledge and visibility to teams. It was easy to scale the resources from a small group to a much larger group as we brought on business leads, group process owners, and then the larger groups of teams.
[02:32] It was very easy to work with IBI and they have been close collaborators in the process of training our team. We found the IBI platform very easy to work with.
[02:44] The reports that were generated were extensive. A lot of data is associated with it. Easy to identify team leads for different process areas. Easy to identify learning paths for groups.
[03:01] We did use the dashboards to understand how many resources were using IBI who had accessed it and when. The dashboards give a lot of information and then the ability to actually extract the reports and download it in a CSV format to then do some analysis on was really helpful.
[03:19] For the training in D365, I think what really went well for our project specifically was that we started early. And again, that’s where the IBI platform was really helpful. It was great that we started almost immediately as we started the project. So that gave our global process owners, our business leads a good idea of what the tool was going to look like.
[03:42] IBI, in its role, kind of provided a very simple platform to introduce users to D365. It was a good experience and definitely something I would use IBI for again – in the context that we did use it this time – as an early introduction to D365.
[04:00] It was interesting to see how the learning path tied in the different areas of work into one learning path, and gave the business leads a good idea as to what that would look like across different platforms. I think grouping those modules together in a learning path, and like I said incentivizing it and gamifying their learning approach, was a really good approach for IBI, and it worked for our users.
TDIndustries
[00:30] My name is Stacie Kritz. I am with TD Industries, and we are a commercial construction and full lifecycle building services organization founded in 1946 by Jack Lowe, Sr. here in Dallas, Texas.
[00:48] The D365 implementation for TD Industries, basically setting the platform for our entire future of the organization. We replaced all of our legacy Solomon systems, as well as our field service applications, with this new highly integrated 21st century ERP Platform.
[01:14] When we started to evaluate how we were going to get all of our 1,500 partners trained right before go-live, we knew that we had about a three-week window to do that. Ultimately, our objective was to provide just-in-time training so that they could have the skills that they needed and then could apply them as they pivoted from their old system into the new system. And so, during the course of our implementation and also during COVID, we knew that we had to do this virtually. And having a partner like IBI really enabled us to put the virtual training model in place, but also provide bite-sized information to our learners that was easily consumable and really aligned with adult learning theory.
[02:10] In the change management approach, we really took a three-legged stool strategy. Number one was training, number two was communications, and then number three was business readiness. So, they (IBI) really helped enable the training leg of the three-legged change management stool.
[02:30] The videos that IBI provided that were off the shelf really helped fast-track our training development. So, we didn’t have to focus on doing anything that was centered around finance and operations. And so it gave the team the ability to focus more on the custom areas that weren’t available with any other off-the-shelf training options.
[02:55] Partnering with IBI during training content creation was one of the most streamlined efficient partners that we’ve ever or I’ve ever had the experience enjoy working with. It was a great experience and I’m super grateful that we were able to find a partner like Elif and IBI because of their domain expertise on D365.
[03:19] Item by item is a great partner. I would wholeheartedly recommend anybody that is thinking about doing an ERP D365 upgrade or implementation to consider IBI as their change management and training partner. Not only are they experts in D365, but they are also experts in adult learning concepts.
[03:42] My name is Heather Minyard and I am a director of our service operations for TD Industries. And for the ERP project, I was the workstream lead for our field service division.
[03:57] The videos that we created were very short videos, and so they kept the users’ attention. They were able to easily follow those to know what step to do next and specifically what they were doing for the task that they were working on.
[04:14] It’s important that when we’re going through training to be repetitive in the things that we are teaching. And the videos allowed for the trainer to show the video to give exposure to the user before they went over the information in more detail.
[04:30] IBI was super simple to implement and use for our training. If we wouldn’t have had the tool and the videos from IBI, it would have been like the first day you’re starting as an infant not knowing anything. So, it would have been very new, very fresh. They would have walked in with no idea of what they were about to see. So, it gave them an opportunity to see that information ahead of time and kind of have some exposure to that information before the training actually started.
[05:07] The IBI platform is easily scalable up or down based on its flexible subscription-based model.
[05:16] IBI has been a huge part of our post-go-live training strategy. In that, we prepared for hyper care, which was a period of about four weeks immediately after our go-live. Being able to point them to the videos as they were actually trying to learn the system was a huge help for our team. Beyond that, we have really leveraged IBI for new team members that have recently joined TD as well as maybe people that needed a little bit of a refresher.
On Running
[00:24] My name is Agnes Simay. I joined On in 2020 May. My first assignment with the company was to be the training manager during the D365 implementation project. And after that, I moved on to lead the customer service team in Europe.
[00:42] The D3665 implementation for us actually was in situated in the framework of a larger project, which was actually a landscape transformation. After the first ten years of the company, this project was really needed for us to be able to scale up our systems. We didn’t only change the ERP system, but we also changed our CRM, our banking tools, our traveling expenses. So, this was a major transformation project also with components of business process redesign and massive change management.
[01:18] We did this project within 18 months, which other ERP projects happen in three years. So, our timelines were stretched with multiple phases. We had two go-lives in 2020 for Europe, North America, and some of the APAC countries. And in 2021, we continued with the APAC countries and Latin America.
[01:42] Our organization hugely benefited from D365, when it comes to scalability. Our old system just didn’t support our growth anymore. And with this new tool, we can serve better our customers because when it comes to automation, it helps us to free up our time and focus on adding more value to our customers. And it also allows us to be more analytic, be more driven by data-based decisions, and have better insights into our customer behaviors.
[02:14] Best to give you an idea, we trained more than 500 people only in the first wave of implementation. So the impact of IBI for us was huge. It was simply not foreseeable in our project’s stretched timelines to train people before even testing starts. We also couldn’t possibly produce any training material, because our system was a work in progress and only a handful of people knew very well the system – those that were busy with design and discussions with the functional consultants. So, without the IBI content, we had no chance to support or produce material for our trainings and to get our key users ready for the user acceptance test.
[02:56] We had a two-step approach to support this big transformation. And because of the complexity and the change, we decided to first train our employees with IBI, to give them the framework: What is this new system? What is the logic behind it? How does it work? What is the language it’s speaking? Because some of the terms were different in our old system and in the new system. After this, once we had a solid base, we could get our team members into live trainings that were based on our own training material that we had time, therefore, to produce once the systems were up and tested. And we could educate our users more on the to-be processes and on the customized specifics of our new system.
[03:46] We used IBI to enable our key users, prepare them for testing, and also our end users for the daily use. We trained the finance team, supply chain, customer service team, and logistics with this tool. Some teams found the standard IBI content spot on from the beginning – for example, the finance team. Whereas other teams have more integration with other tools more specified customized system, and therefore they had to adapt a little bit the training material.
[04:19] In any way, we could never have trained people in the classic way so quickly and in a remote setup. All that, we have to remember happened during the COVID pandemic. So online work had to be taken to the next level. Having the IBI framework proceed our own live trainings saved enormous time and questions for the trainers before the like training started, but also speed it up the testing process for us.
[04:49] IBI gave us flexibility. Everyone could use it in their own time and pace and expert their skills. So whether the person was visual or learns by hearing or by practicing, IBI had it all. We foster the explorer spirit. So this is one of our values. We really promote self-learning within the company and this tool was perfectly serving this purpose. The platform itself is self-explanatory. Everyone was able to use it without any further onboarding or training needed.
[05:22] As an administrator, I appreciated the fact that I could pull, at any time, progress reports that I could feed to the team leads. So they could follow up on the progress of their team members and see if we are aligned with our planning. It turned the whole experience into healthy competition within the company.
[05:41] Another aspect I really appreciated was also that I was able to adjust the monthly trainee list, very easily. So I could add back or suspend people, depending on their availability. The turnaround time with the IBI team is always very quick. So, in no time, I could adjust the monthly training list.
[06:01] The tool gave our learners a solid overview of the system and good basics to go into the live trainings. They paired it up with practice – meaning they were able to click around in our own customized training environment at the same time as listening to the IBI tool. This gave them confidence and the IBI helped to break up this whole new system into digestible small chunks. So it just brought the whole system closer to their reach.
[06:32] Some of the team leads have reviewed the standard learning paths to better suit the needs of their teams. So, depending on what was the degree of customization for the team, they adapted the video. So we dropped out some of the irrelevant videos from the standard package. We could adapt the learning path to suit the best needs of every team. The changes were made super quickly by the IBI team and we had our own customized learning paths in no time.
[07:04] It’s a very accessible and professional team, great business partners. They supported us along this journey operationally. But also, with giving us tips on learning strategy and on the content from Microsoft tips itself. Changes we needed on the platform, they’re very easy to communicate on and to get them set up in the system with very short turnaround time.
[07:28] I absolutely recommend for others to use the IBI platform because of the flexibility it provides, because of the relevance of the content, and because of the excellent partnership we built with IBI.
Aubainerie
[00:32] So Hi. My name is Patrick Pichette. I’m a business analyst and a BRM, working as the specialist for D365 F&O and the Commerce project. And I work for the beautiful retail stores of Aubainerie.
[00:49] Regarding the content, it was very easy to use. The fact that it is very granular, was a big help because mostly everything was new for the complete teams. So, it eased the process of learning.
[01:07] Having this learning (I mean this training) be able to see the Commerce, to see the Headquarters part, to make them help understand that now (they don’t have a PM by itself), it helped them to understand the complete process. So, it was very good for them. And it was very helpful when they start to slowly acquire access to the first test environment.
[01:34] A lot of them told me after that “Oh, I remember what I read, what I learned from this course. Can you tell me Patrick where is it exactly? Especially this thing and this thing”. So, it raised a lot of questions after. So, it was a very good decision to use that kind of learning
[01:52] At some point, we had some people who are doing very well, which is we could see that the curve of learning was, you know, a stable one and rising up. And we saw that some people were kind of stopped or slowed. So, even for the director (for me), I was able to identify – maybe we could talk with this person. Is there something that it is blocking? Is there something that the person is not learning?
[02:14] So I think the board and seeing the progress for the person, seeing the achievement also. Not to say “Hmmm. You didn’t do it”. More to maximize. “Can I help you with something? If there’s a concept that you don’t understand.” So, it was very helpful.
[02:30] Since we were in a pandemic situation, at the beginning of the learning a lot of people were all working from home. So, if we had planned to have like a traditional session with a teacher within a classroom in everything, it wouldn’t have been as efficient as it was like this, because everybody had the platform. They could do whatever they are able to do it.
[02:56] They could hide themselves in a room if there are homes with the kids and everything. So, it was the best way of doing it. And even after the pandemic, I would recommend using it like this. Because you could define say “Alright, I’m going to do this that part of my day, when I know I’m more mostly quiet or it is the best part of the day for me to learn.
[03:21] As a platform using it and in the project in the speed (we were on a fast track), using the IBI platform was the best thing. So, I recommend using that platform, especially the quality of the content, the easiness of using the platform, and definitely the accessibility of the IBI team.
Friedman's Home Improvement
[00:29] I think it was important for us because we had spent so much time working on making the system system-ready, that if we didn’t take the time to allow people to understand how it is supposed to work, it would have been an investment that didn’t yield all of the returns it should have.
[00:45] And we sat down as a leadership team, to weigh the investment that we were making into this platform. And, unanimously we decided that if we didn’t do this, we wouldn’t get the expected result we actually wanted, and it would have been detrimental to the team to say “Here is this brand new platform, but you don’t know how to use it” and we did not want to have that happen.
[01:06] Everything was pretty self-explanatory. The way that it worked for me is I have an admin view, so I can oversee all the people on my team and where their progress is as well as my own. So, just going up switching between either the admin view or the user view. Doing it through the user view, it was right there. So, everything that I needed to learn was – here’s a box, here is another box, click into it, here are all the videos you need to watch, and then here are all the learning paths that are attached to it.
[01:35] So it was super easy to navigate through. Super self-explanatory. I was trying to teach my team how to use it and they’re like “Oh, we got this. This is super easy.” So that was really great.
[01:47] We didn’t need a whole lot of training on how to use the platform itself. The user setup has been super simple. We just communicate a list of users that we need set up in a template that was provided to us by IBI. And, we’ve had a very quick turnaround on getting all of our users set up with plenty of time to be able to support the plan training efforts.
[02:13] With the system there, I kind of had someone else to back me up really. Because it is a new system to me as well, I’m not super experienced with it. It’s not like I’ve been training on this for years and years. This is what we’re going to teach. We have someone to kind of reassure me that this is what we’re going to do. And, there were even times that some of my classes were like “Oh, wait, how do I do that again?” So, I’ll just kind of watch the video along with the class roll quick. So, it really helps. It just made it a lot easier.
[02:40] The standard out-of-the-box IBI videos were really a great fit for us in certain parts of our business. We found that in certain areas like accounting, finance where things are a little more black and white (there is more of a standard around those things). A lot of that content was a direct fit and needed little to no modification.
[03:03] We got really awesome feedback from our team members who were watching the standard out-of-the-box videos. We definitely had areas where our business required us to either customize D365 or where we chose to customize D365 to be a better fit for us, we decided that we wanted to make custom content – in particular on point of sale and partnered with IBI. And again, the feedback when we got those final videos back to us was overwhelmingly positive.
[03:33] I’m really proud of how the training has turned out with the help of IBI. It really allowed us to expand the knowledge of all these team members very easily. It’s essentially my knowledge being given to them directly just through this IBI video channel, and I believe it’s been incredibly successful for our training in our go-live implementation of D365.
[04:04] I would definitely 100% percent recommend everything about it because it worked for my whole team and I have people that are 18 and I have people that are 65. So that’s really great for all ages as well.
[04:16] With 100% confidence, we would not have been able to train as many people as we’ve trained in the short period of time that we’ve been training them to the level that we have trained them to without IBI and this approach (video content in particular).
[04:36] It’s made it where we can deliver this information very consistently to our team in a relatively short span of time. We can reach more people than we could have with traditional classroom training.
[04:51] What we did with the investment with IBI is not only put it into video that allowed people to do it at their own pace, but it allowed us to also keep that platform intact for new hires that we can repeat the process, which we couldn’t do with our paper-based without keeping the training staff in place. So, this was really an investment, not only to get us to go live but also a way for us to continue the process after go-live.
Bioworld
[00:30] If you’re like us and you’re faced with everybody’s doing their everyday job, and you’re going to run this new system, and you need people to understand from the get-go, how to navigate a system, how to get at the information they need and set them up to be successful when you actually go into a full-on training and or full-on testing of the system, this was extremely helpful.
[00:50] You’ll be able to spread the knowledge very easily in comparison to doing traditional classrooms because we have different schedules, different types of people, we have different learning types like you’re a visual or your listener. These training materials that IBI has, it embodies every kind of different learner that you have.
[01:10] I love the flexibility of online training. What IBI provided for us I thought was very convenient, especially for our fast-paced environment here about wolves. And having these modules that were very short (two minutes to three minutes) was very convenient to be able to squeeze in between my work schedule.
[01:33] I really like being able to search for stuff when I need to find what I’m looking for when I am stuck. Everything was laid out well. Learning paths were cool.
[01:42] After actually being more in detail in D365 with my specific role, IBI really has assisted and helped going back and let me refresh now that I am in the system. So that has really helped in the convenience. That is very helpful for me.
[02:05] From a manager standpoint, we were able to actually go in and pace by pace – who’s doing what? Who has seen it? Go challenge them. Hey, you have been in the training. You need to go to the training. What can we do to make this better? How can we free up your time?
[02:18] A lot of our team actually were very complimentary and we were in meetings and we’d be doing testing and actually navigating the system and there will be people who were super good at it because they’ve been in the training. We were able to give ideas and tips and tricks to their fellow team members, which was great.
[02:38] The system is very intuitive and is very user-friendly. I work in IT, so this is one of the systems that literally does not require you to take an online class to manage users, deactivate users, add users.
[02:53] I would say the number one win for us was the lack of fear of the system because they had been in there and they had watched and they understood from the ground up, how the system worked, how it operated, how they navigated, the things that would make you very uncomfortable – if the first time you walked in was to a classroom training and you never even signed on to the system – so that was great.
[03:15] I’d say part two is, we’re getting close to implementation, and when we do that, being able to have something to refer back to, knowing the tips and tricks that you’ve established out there, and given to them will be extremely helpful to make sure that we are at the success we want to see.