Training and Change Management specialists First Friday have completed the first stage of a training and communications programme to support the £1million Point of Sale roll out at Harvey Nichols. First Friday will work alongside the project team to communicate the changes to all staff within stores and provide a structured best-practice training programme for the Point of Sale implementation.

The team at Harvey Nichols had identified that the success of the Point of Sale implementation would be largely dependant on positive adoption by staff within stores. With a short implementation deadline set for the Birmingham pilot store, Harvey Nichols were not able to develop quality training materials to the standard they wanted themselves. It was with this in mind that the project team sought the services of First Friday to create a bespoke training programme to ensure that the 2,000 staff within all branches of Harvey Nichols understood the new procedures, and the benefits that the implementation would bring.

It was Martin Schofield, Head of IT at Harvey Nichols who was responsible for engaging First Friday’s services: ‘First Friday offered a very focused programme that fit with our requirements perfectly, we were impressed with their whole approach, the speed with which the programme was executed and the huge amount of business objectivity they brought to it.’ He continued:’ It is vital that we have a best practice model that is consistent across the group, First Friday were able to deliver this’.

First Friday completed the first phase of training at the pilot store within four weeks to coincide with the pilot roll out. The training programme will then be applied at each Harvey Nichols branch as the implementation continues across all 5 UK stores. The First Friday strategy involves creating a group of Super Users, who will themselves become experts in and ultimately responsible for delivering a user programme to all shop floor staff. The programme will also provide managers with a broad-spectrum course on how to manage the Epos system along with cash office management. First Friday have also created quick reference guides to be stationed at each point of sale in store for ease of referral.

A Harvey Nichols Super User said of the programme: ‘It was initially quite daunting to think that we would need to become experts in using the new Point of Sale system in order to train others. First Friday based the training on experiences relevant to our roles and we were quickly able to understand the importance of the new system and how this would impact the customer’.

Robin Turner Managing Director at First Friday commented on the programme: ‘Developing business and process focused training to support the implementation of new or upgraded systems is an essential part of achieving common standards across the enterprise in order to get the best return from them.’ He continues: ‘Training Super Users to become experts is an excellent way of capturing key development objectives effectively and efficiently, ensuring that there is always an expert on hand to deal with problems as they arise in a live situation’.

The remaining stores are due to roll out the new Epos system from January 2005.

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