Situation

Our client was a distributor of the biggest names in high-end fashion to the Middle East.  They had engaged us to implement an Oracle system across their varied brands and functional areas across the region.  They had successfully rolled out an implementation with their stores and offices in Dubai and we were asked to support the next part of the project was implementing the system in Saudi Arabia, the biggest region for the business.

This was training on a major scale; we were tasked with training over 1,000 people, across a full range of functional areas, on the new systems.  With 18 training rooms and over 3,500 individual attendances throughout the training period, it was a challenge from a scheduling perspective.

Training individuals from Saudi Arabia, a very traditional country, meant there were also cultural issues to bear in mind and effective translation of materials was also an issue.

Approach

Due to the sheer number of people who needed to be trained, we made a strategic decision to run cascade training.

We began by working with the business to develop a Training Stategy, Training Needs Analysis and training materials, lesson plans and exercises.  We also created e-learning modules, completion of which was a pre-requisite to the main training.

We then identified over 40 bilingual trainers from within the business and ran a comprehensive train the trainer programme which included, IT training delivery skills, classroom training to up skill them on content and inviting them to Dubai to shadow colleagues in Dubai stores which had already switched to Oracle.  As a final step, to ensure that the training had been fully absorbed, we asked them to present back what they had learned.

Once we were confident that the Business Trainers were successfully trained, we ran pilots training in Saudi, per functional area.  Once the pilots were successfully completed, we rolled out the main training.

With 18 training rooms and 12 attendees per room, there were over 200 people per day being trained.  A manual process would not have been possible to keep track of progress so we built bespoke registration and evaluation software to enable the individual trainers to record who had been trained, and what was outstanding.

Outcome

This training project was a challenge mainly due to the sheer size of the numbers who needed quite complex training.  At the end of the project Oracle was launched successfully, all the relevant people were trained and they averaged over 80% in their assessment scores. The users needed very little in the way of go live support which indicated that the training had been very successful so much so that CMG won an Operational Excellence Award from Chalhoub as a result.