An Agile response to Blue Yonder Systems Training development
First Friday works with many international businesses and has a long standing relationship with this retailer based in South Africa. They are very successful with more than 35 years in business and stores across Africa.
Over the years, First Friday has developed a strong relationship with the Learning and Development (L&D) Team within this retail business.
We have worked together to determine the required skill set for their people, developed competency frameworks, and bespoke learning interventions to support these competencies. Over the years we have also developed training for some of their new systems.
As a result of this long-standing partnership, they didn’t hesitate to ask us to develop their training materials when a new challenge arose for a systems implementation. Working remotely from the UK, we developed the training solution on time, and with very positive feedback.
The Challenge
The retailer was implementing a new Blue Yonder Demand and Fulfilment system, which would impact all members of their buying, merchandising and planning teams. However, they did not have the capacity or capability to develop systems training for the rollout.
Could we help them by developing training… in just 11 weeks?
Yes we could! We were able to mobilise a team of experienced consultants, with the necessary business background in Merchandising and Planning, to develop the training material remotely and hand over for delivery on-site – all within the required timeframe.
The Solution
We began with a scoping and planning piece to quantify the amount of training required.
Demand and Fulfilment systems use complex algorithms to do a lot of the work for the teams – but they need to understand how it works if they are to trust the system and use it to its full potential.
Together we decided to separate the training of the principles from the actual Blue Yonder systems training, to build confidence in what the system does and enable delegates to focus solely on the ‘how to’ in their systems training.
As ever, we were concerned with delivering meaningful role-based training in manageable chunks, and so we planned a scenario-based session to follow the navigation and ‘how to’ modules, to allow delegates to put into practice what they had learnt.
Having agreed the scope of the project, we mobilised a small team of experienced trainers with the necessary background in to begin the development. The trainers worked remotely with the process owners and the L&D team to view the system and check understanding.
Our agreed quality assurance process included milestone content reviews with the process owners and the L&D team.
The Results
We developed four “concepts” modules and six “system” modules, on time and within budget – and were thanked profusely! – when we handed over the material to the client for delivery.
