Changing Lives One ERP System at a Time

Our “Why”

Have you ever met someone who knew exactly what they stood for—what they valued and contributed to the world? It’s refreshing to meet someone with that level of self-knowledge and clarity of purpose. Don’t you get the same feeling from businesses and organizations that are also crystal clear about why they exist?

At SYTE, we actually call that a business’s why.

You might be surprised to see that our why is changing lives.

We know what you’re thinking. Changing lives? Isn’t that a bit ambitious for an ERP Consulting Group?

Yes, changing lives is an ambitious why, but we stand by it. You see, by bringing value to the businesses we work with, we help them grow. Growing businesses have an impact on their employees and their customers, and that impact can literally change someone’s life. Listen to Erin’s (SYTE’s CEO) story below and you’ll see what we mean.

Susan’s Story

“About 10 years ago, SYTE was asked to help a local dairy manufacturer select and install ERP and route accounting solutions. They were a manually intensive operation—drivers had paper invoices and were running 75 routes a day delivering product to major grocery chains and small mom-and-pop stores.”

“Because there was so much manual entry, any errors that were made also had to be manually corrected. The front office consisted of three or four order takers who entered customer orders. Being an order taker was an important, time sensitive, and highly regimented role. As the business grew, so did order volume, as well as the number of errors and corrections. If the status quo remained, scaling the business would mean hiring more and more order takers.”

“The order takers were supervised by a 47-year veteran of the business we’ll call ‘Susan’. Like many of the 300 people that worked for this dairy manufacturer, Susan had been with the company many years—in her case since she was 17 years old. Susan and her team of order takers were central to the success of the business because they oversaw so much of the order-to-cash process.”

“Susan’s buy-in would be essential for the ERP implementation to succeed. However, because we were working to drastically change and automate her role, we didn’t get Susan’s buy-in at first. It’s easy to sympathize with someone whose role in the company has remained the same for 47 years! It must have been scary for her, and that fear drove her initial resistance to the new system. She pushed back and at times grew angry or frustrated with the core team that was driving the ERP change initiative. But, Susan was also the team’s most valuable subject matter expert. She knew what had to be done, in what order, and by what time.”

“It was the company’s loyalty to Susan—and hers to it—that was key to her eventual buy in. Once it was made clear to her that she was not going to be replaced, but that her job would be made several times easier with this new system, Susan became a critical part of the change-over.”

“Today, after 57 years, Susan is still supervising the order takers and is also the system administrator for the new ERP solution, a role she was initially terrified of and never would have imagined! At the end of the day, change took place within Susan because we were committed to her success, to understanding her needs and wants, and to building a relationship with her. She was and still is important to the business.”

Erin illustrates how much Susan had grown by adding, “One of the best moments in my career is when Susan, who was an avid and skilled quilter in her spare time, gave me a quilting bag that she made. So many of her hard edges became softened in this process, and it meant a lot that she gave me such a personal gift.”

This is what we, at SYTE, mean by changing lives. We invested a lot of time and effort to bring Susan from reluctant employee to project advocate and leader. As a result, her knowledge and skillset grew exponentially, and she is as critical to the success of this small town dairy manufacturer as she has ever been.