How Clorox made its legacy ERP transformation a clean transition for employees

At the Clorox Company, employees have been training religiously for the past few years—not for a marathon, but the company’s transition to a new cloud-based enterprise resource planning system.

In February, Clorox announced it had wrapped a five-year project to upgrade its 20-year-old legacy ERP system to SAP S/4HANA. Clorox SVP and Chief Information and Data Officer Chau Banks told IT Brew the company took a greenfield approach (i.e., starting from scratch rather than upgrading a current ERP system) to the $580 million revamp, which is intended to help it remain “competitive and agile” from a technology standpoint.

“Of course, the ultimate result is to respond faster to consumer needs across the channels,” Banks said, adding that Clorox also wanted a unified platform and data for “end-to-end visibility.”

People skills. Clorox spent the past five years priming its workforce for the modernized ERP system, including 38,000 training hours for more than 5,000 employees. Banks, who said this was the thirteenth major SAP implementation of her career, said that the company prioritized transparency with employees about the purpose of the incoming changes and the potential benefits. Change impact assessments and other evaluations helped inform Clorox’s approach to training, which was provided in a variety of different learning formats to employees.

“We had live office hours during the training, and even after the training, we did a lot of simulation in terms of the core business processes,” Banks said. In addition, short-form videos reinforced what employees learned.

Clorox has identified more than 500 “super users,” employees who are proficient in skills required for the new ERP system, who can serve as a resource for colleagues in their respective plants and worksites.

Change management 101. Rimini Street Global CIO Joe Locandro told IT Brew that successful ERP transformations are highly dependent on speed of deployment.

“The longer it takes, the more risk there is,” Locandro said. “The shorter it takes, the less risk.”

Locandro said organizations should prioritize training content—which he added should be customized for each business and specific roles within the organization—to help ease employees’ adjustment to new systems. One of the most common mistakes organizations make during ERP transitions is giving out training materials at the end of the transition, he added.

“You start getting awareness and change management up front, and you do it at different employee cohorts, from management to middle management to office workers,” Locandro said.

Continuous learning. While Clorox has completed its rollout of its new SAP ERP system, Banks said employee training hasn’t stopped. The company is leveraging its network of super users to handle future questions among employees.

“The feedback is that people have been really excited about this. It is a new graphic user interface with SAP S/4,” Banks said. “It’s easier. It’s relevant.”

Banks recommends companies keep users front-of-mind when planning ERP transformations to ensure smooth change management.

“It has to be part of the design and not something that you plan into the program later…I can’t stress enough how it is important throughout the entire life cycle of your implementation program,” she said.

Locandro added that transparency and clear communication with employees is crucial for a successful transition. “The most common problem with change management, again, is there’s no ongoing communications, especially when it’s in the quiet period of being built,” he said. “And then, all of a sudden there’s a flurry [of communication].”