ERP Training for Small Manufacturers: Help Your Team Learn
Training employees on unfamiliar systems can be a daunting process. That’s why choosing an easy-to-use, intuitive system can make a huge difference to team morale and project outcomes.
Someone who has answered customer questions for years may need help finding an order in a new ERP. They still know the customer and the job. What they need to learn is where to find the right information, what they are allowed to change, and when to ask for help.
For a small shop, that learning has to fit around deliveries, phone calls, and production. Trying the software with your employees before you buy gives you a chance to find the awkward parts early and plan training around the work they actually do.
Trying the software with your team
The person presenting a vendor demo already knows where everything is. Before committing, arrange a trial where your employees use realistic sample records in a test setup confirmed with the vendor. Your office employee could look up an order and determine its current status. Someone from receiving could record a delivery. This follows the basic approach to usability testing described by NIST: representative users doing representative tasks.
Each person will need a brief introduction. If you are comparing systems, keep the tasks and introductory help similar. Note where someone needs a prompt or stops because they do not know what will happen next. An unfamiliar label is different from being unable to tell whether saving will change inventory.
Include an ordinary exception, such as a delivery that does not match the purchase order. Does the employee know where to stop and how to get help? When something is unclear, ask what they expected to happen. Give them an explanation and another attempt before deciding whether the workflow is a problem.
If a routine task still leaves people unsure which record to use or what their action changes, bring that example to the vendor. Find out whether configuration will resolve it and ask to try the revised setup. You want to know what your team would actually be working with before you buy.
The location of the trial matters too. In a Practical Machinist discussion about shop-floor data collection, the original poster described missed ERP entries in a shop spread across three buildings, with one shared computer in each building.
A trial at an office desk will not show you how long someone waits for a shared terminal or walks across the floor to reach it. Try the actual workstation and employee login as well. A missing permission or an inconvenient computer needs attention before training starts. Let employees know you are checking how the software fits their work, so they do not feel they have to hide a difficulty to make a good impression.
Training around familiar work
Before showing screens, talk through a normal job with the people who do it. For receiving, that includes the paperwork arriving with the delivery, the checks before accepting it, and what happens when the quantity is wrong. If two people handle the same situation differently, agree on the process before teaching it in the ERP.
The first sessions should cover each person’s regular work and the information they pass to others. Receiving needs to understand how its entries affect the people checking material availability. The person covering receiving during an absence needs practice too.
Training also needs to account for what will change in the employee’s day. Someone who regularly interrupts production to ask about an order needs to know where to look for its status and when to check with the floor. If the new process adds an entry to their work, knowing who uses that information gives them a reason for doing it beyond filling in another field.
Making time for useful practice
For an order-status exercise, the trainer could show how to identify the right order and explain what its status tells the employee. Then the employee works through a similar customer question, talking through what they are checking. Finding a date on a screen does not automatically give someone authority to promise it to a customer; that decision belongs in the lesson too.
This sequence of demonstration, employee trial, and follow-up draws on the Job Instruction approach described by NIST’s Manufacturing Extension Partnership. Watching the employee try the task shows the trainer which decisions or terms need another explanation.
Practice needs a safe place. Ask the vendor to confirm that the training environment cannot send real customer messages, create live orders, or change actual inventory and accounting records. Employees should know how to recognize that environment and where to stop if they are unsure.
Someone answering phones throughout a session will miss parts of it. Having a colleague cover the phone gives them time to work through a task they will use again soon. Where coverage is difficult, a shorter session on one task is more manageable than trying to cover several workflows between interruptions. The rollout schedule also needs room for a second attempt at the difficult parts.
At the next session, the employee could work through an ordinary task while the trainer observes without supplying each step. Do they find the right record and understand the result? Do they recognize when they need help? If they still need a prompt at the same point, you have a specific place to pick up the lesson.
How you respond when someone gets stuck
If the same question comes up again, ask the employee to show you where they got stuck. They might know the procedure but lack permission to use it. The record might use a different unit of measure from the paperwork. Or the instructions might skip a decision that was obvious to the person who wrote them.
The example helps you decide what to do next. If several people stop at the same field, a walkthrough with the vendor can help clear up that part of the process. If someone knows the steps but has only tried them once, another session on that task gives them more practice. An experienced employee questioning the new process may also have spotted a problem worth resolving before everyone learns it.
Keeping help available after go live
A customer return or an unusual correction might first come up weeks after training. Even someone comfortable with everyday work will need a way to check the procedure.
Eligible main-dashboard users can ask Paxy for workflow help, with questions such as “How do I start a customer return?” or “How do I correct inventory assigned to the wrong lot?” Paxy draws on the system documentation and links to the relevant instructions. Name the screen and describe what you are trying to do, then check the linked guidance before making a change. Admin and executive users can also ask read-only questions about ERP data. Paxy does not change records, and floor-only accounts do not have access.
A short job note is useful for the parts specific to your shop, such as who approves a correction or whom to contact when the example does not fit. It should link to the relevant help page rather than duplicate instructions that could change. The note also needs an owner who will update it when the process changes.
At PAX, we want employees to feel comfortable reaching out to us directly. We’re here to help train your team and get people up to speed. Ordinary learning questions do not need to pass through a manager first. Your shop’s approval rules still apply to transactions and process changes.
A brief record of unresolved questions and who is following up helps keep them from getting lost during the first weeks. “Receiving is confusing” is hard to act on. A note such as “The delivery quantity differs from the purchase order; who approves the difference before we record it?” gives you a specific question to settle. The answer belongs with the note, along with the agreed procedure or help link, so the next person does not have to ask again.
What to ask your ERP provider
Before committing, ask the provider what training and support are included, how employees reach help after go live, and who helps with infrequent tasks and corrections.
At PAX, both subscriptions include onboarding, data mapping and migration, training, and support at no additional charge. The details are on our pricing page.
Bring us a question your employee could not answer during the trial. Working through it together gives you a chance to try the support your team will rely on.