Your Digital Transformation Initiative’s Secret Weapon: People, Not Just Tech

Key Takeaways:

• Training is the make-or-break factor for your digital transformation process
• Effective digital initiatives support ensures customer satisfaction and requires a dedicated, sustained partnership
• Investing in learning and enablement is a direct strategy for effective change management, retention, meeting customer expectations, and ROI

The Full Article

The benefits of digital transformation are massive: blazing efficiency, considerable ROI, and an undeniable competitive edge. Then why do  80% of these projects fail? The answer is simple and often overlooked: inadequate training and support for the people using the new technology.

Companies pour capital into cutting-edge enterprise solutions, only to leave new hires and existing staff to “fend for themselves.” This neglect, also on the part of the vendor not providing success support services, turns a strategic investment into a costly risk, losing not just the return on the digitalization investment but also valuable workers, revenue, and market advantage.

The success of your technology is directly tied to the competency of your people. An effective onboarding process alone can boost new hire retention by up to 82%, making comprehensive employee learning a primary strategy for retention and ROI.

Digital transformation initiatives demand an enterprise solution delivered with comprehensive, ongoing support and training, from day one through the entire first year of implementation.

Aligning Onboarding & Training for Breakthrough Success

To ensure your team is equipped to maximize the value of your digital solution, you need more than a generic help desk. You need a structured, holistic approach that provides education, expert partnership, and a dedicated customer success team.

According to a Gallup survey, only 29% of new hires report feeling fully prepared and supported to excel in their role after their onboarding experience.

Here are three essential examples of digital transformation resources that bridge the gap between technology investment and realized value, using the successful model of aPriori.

1. aP Academy: Accelerated Learning and Onboarding

Negative onboarding experiences drive nearly two-thirds of employees to consider leaving a new job within their first year.

The failure to quickly educate and support your team directly impacts retention and your bottom line. As the statistic above indicates, buy-in is crucial to your digital transformation strategy and user adoption.

aP Academy ensures that the user experience results in a successful digital transformation journey. It is designed to quickly turn users into skilled, independent, and productive contributors. It provides comprehensive education tailored to specific roles, such as Engineering and Sourcing, ensuring training aligns directly with critical business goals, including:

• Accelerated Onboarding: Detailed, user-friendly courses rapidly accelerate new employees’ software knowledge, facilitating quick integration of real-world insights into daily workflows.
• Maximized Software Value: Through self-paced courses, hands-on lab work, and instructor-led training, users learn to maximize their solution’s potential, driving greater ROI.
• Targeted Skills Development: Training is designed for core activities and capabilities, aligning users with key business outcomes like:
  • Cost Optimization and Negotiation: Developing accurate “should-cost” modeling for fact-based supply chain negotiations.
  • Design for Manufacturability and Cost (DFM/DTC): Identifying cost drivers and manufacturing issues early in the design phase, with fewer iterative rounds.
  • Sustainability: Analyzing and making trade-off decisions related to the carbon footprint of manufacturing processes.

 ”…we still have that same team of four. But now they have given us a co-op. He does a great job, and I’ll be honest with you, if it weren’t for AP Academy, he would not be where he is today. But with AP Academy, he’s doing quite well.” – Jill Snyder, Director of Cost Engineering at GE Appliances

2. Expert Services: Dedicated, Holistic Optimization

A “one-and-done” implementation is a recipe for failure.

Customers who use dedicated, monthly Expert Services (ES) achieve four times the ROI compared to those who don’t. The ES team provides a holistic, proactive, and personalized approach to address customer needs, optimize workflows, and every stage of product development, enabling customers to choose the right ES program that aligns with and supports their business strategy and manufacturing and cost objectives.

In one use case, the ES team identified $200 million in potential savings for a customer immediately, and in one workshop.

The customer’s dedicated consultant acts as a partner, working on a flexible monthly cadence to ensure you are continually making the most of your investment:

• Assess and Analyze: Deeply exploring your business needs and processes to create a Value Roadmap that ES executes, ensuring the identification of outlier opportunities for savings.
• Digital Technologies Adoption: Providing intensive, ongoing mentoring sessions to ensure stakeholders extract the full value from the solution and streamline workflows.
• Optimize Operations: Coaching users on applying repeatable methodologies across all projects, from design to cost engineering.

This partnership is crucial to improving profitability and achieving immediate ROI.

Explore more examples of Expert Services’ success with these case studies.

3. General Customer Success Support: A Commitment to Your First Year & Beyond

Although specialized support services, onboarding, educational, and training programs are essential to ensuring digital transformation success, more general customer support is equally important.

True partnership extends beyond specialized training; it requires a robust, company-wide commitment to your success. The most successful digital transformations are supported by vendors dedicated to “handholding” during the critical first year.

A strong Customer Success Support model ensures:

• Total Involvement: The vendor is deeply involved in the entire implementation and set-up phase.
• Cross-Departmental Alignment: Support is consistent and collaborative across all departments, providing a seamless customer experience.
• Commitment to the Journey: The vendor assures the customer that they will be with them every step of the way, proving a key point of differentiation.

One customer notes that aPriori’s dedication and handholding during the first year has had a tremendous impact on their success, stating, “We didn’t realize how involved aPriori was going to be in the whole implementation and set up phase, and how they were going to hold our hands through that, and they want us to be super successful.”

This customer also reveals that it was not just one aPriori department that ensured this success, but it was across the board. One of the most critical elements was that aPriori assured the customer that they would be with them every step of their first year journey using our solution. In their words, “That’s really a different point of differentiation for aPriori…”

The Cost of Neglect and the Power of Partnership

Replacing an employee costs employers an average of 33.3% of the employee’s base salary. Strategies such as training and team building are no longer “soft” benefits—they are directly tied to ROI and employee retention.

Today’s digital transformation initiatives require an enterprise solution that is an absolute partner, not one that simply hands over the keys and walks away. Stop letting your valuable employees “fend for themselves.”

By leveraging comprehensive learning and training programs offered by your digital solutions vendor, you gain a significant competitive advantage over the 80% who fail.

Aligning onboarding, training, and support solutions strengthens your digital transformation efforts. Moreover, they streamline business processes, enhance operational efficiency, improve decision-making and scalability,  and reinforce users’ key performance indicators (KPIs).

You ensure your team is onboarded and upskilled quickly and thoroughly, aligning individual competency with organizational goals for guaranteed success.