To complete the analogy: Most of us have a handy "medical symptoms" guide or have bookmarked a Website to help us determine if that pain in our stomach is likely appendicitis, indigestion, or something far worse. The next step is to consult your physician. In the same vein, if you believe that training is or could be affecting the output of your ERP implementation, then you should immediately contact a reputable ERP training consultant.

In the meantime, consider this your handy guide to ERP Training Symptoms.

For large-scale implementations, such as SAP, training is often packaged as part of the original proposal. The training elements are line listed with specifics, matched to each phase on the implementation plan (in SAP R/3, this implementation plan is called ASAP). And, in the best case, this includes a plan for customizing the training plan and matching this to internal and external resources.

More often, however, training is bulleted as a vague deliverable towards the bottom of the proposal and no insights or specifics are provided as to how training will be designed, documented or delivered. Even worse, the client organization, which is spending millions of dollars on an ERP implementation and, even more importantly, is counting on the output of this system to meet key organizational goals, has no idea what percentage of their contract is allocated to training, nor of any ROI or metrics assigned to the training.