ERP Implementation Gone Wrong: You Have to Talk to the Employees

02:10 · Season 2 Focus: The How of Dream Manager

It drives away your best employees. It creates resentment. It breaks trust sometimes so completely that you never get it back. And I know this because I've seen it from both sides. I've been the consultant coming in to implement these systems and I've been on the implementation side watching good people leave because nobody thought about what this change was doing to them. So today we're going to talk about why this happens, what actually goes wrong, and most importantly, how you prevent it, how you implement the systems you need without destroying the culture you've worked so hard to build. All right. So, let me tell you about this manufacturer.

Midsize operation, about 150 people, been in business for 30 years, familyowned, second generations running it. They made industrial components, really specialized stuff, and they were good at it. Their customers love them. Their employees had been there forever. I mean, the average tenure was like 12 years. in manufacturing. That's incredible. Most places people are turning over every two, three years. And they had this culture where people actually cared. You know what I mean? They showed up early. They stayed late. When orders were behind, they helped each other out. The kind of place where the owner knew everyone's name, knew their kids' names, showed up to their weddings. You know, the kind of company we all say we want to build.

04:05 · The Scary Reality of ERP Implementations

But they had a problem. Their systems were ancient. Like they were running on software from the '90s. Literally the '9s. They had paper travelers on the shop floor, manual data entry everywhere, inventory counts that took two weeks. And as they were trying to grow, trying to take on bigger customers, these systems or lack thereof were just killing. Orders were getting delayed because information wasn't flowing. They couldn't give customers real-time updates. They were losing bids because they couldn't quote complex jobs fast enough. So, the leadership team, they made a decision. We're going to implement a modern ERP system, cloud-based, fully integrated, all the bells and whistles.

And here's the thing, they did everything right, at least on paper. They hired a reputable consulting firm. They budgeted appropriately, actually went over budget to make sure they did it right. They formed a steering committee with representatives from every department. They went through the whole selection process, looked at multiple vendors, did site visits, watched demos. They chose a system that was built specifically for manufacturers their size. Everything looked perfect. Then the consultants came in, did their process mapping, their requirements gathering, all the standard stuff. They spent months configuring the system, setting up workflows, migrating data, testing everything. They scheduled training sessions, created documentation, and set up a testing environment. I mean, by the book, everything you were supposed to do. The go live date was set for a Monday morning in October. Big kickoff meeting, catered breakfast, the whole company gathered together. The owner gave this speech about how this was going to position them for the next 30 years of growth and how this investment in everyone's future and that they flipped the switch. First day was chaos, but that's normal, right? Everyone expects some bumps during go live. System was slow because everyone was logging in at once. People couldn't find things.

06:30 · Story: Manufacturer with 150 Employees

They're clicking through menus trying to figure out where the screens went. The help desk was just slammed with tickets, but the consultants were there walking the floor, helping people through it. And by the end of week one, things were starting to settle down. People were getting the hang of the basics. Production was moving slower than before, but moving. But here's where it started to go wrong. The system worked exactly how it was designed to work. It enforced processes. It required data entry at every single step. It wouldn't let you move forward until you completed all the fields. And for the consultants, for the leadership team looking at the dashboard and reports, this was perfect. This was exactly what they wanted. visibility, control, and standardization.

But on the shop floor, in the office, for the people actually doing the work every day, it felt completely different. It felt like the company didn't trust them anymore. You see, before the ERP system, when someone with 12 years of experience knew an order, needed to move fast, they just moved it. They grabbed the paperwork, walked it to the next station, made sure it got done. They had relationships in place. They knew who to talk to. They could read the priority just by looking at the schedule board. Now, everything had to go through the system. Every transaction, every movement, every decision had to be documented and approved. The machine operators who used to just know what to set up next, now they had to wait for the system to tell them. The production scheduler who used to walk the floor and adjust things on the fly, well, now she had to enter every change into a system and wait for it to recalculate. And the purchasing manager who had relationships with suppliers going back decades who could call in a favor and get parts rushed now had to create purchase requisitions and wait for approval workflows.

And the thing is the system didn't know what these people knew. It didn't know that this particular customer always needed their orders 2 days early. didn't know that this machine ran better with slightly different settings than what was in the documentation. It didn't know that this supplier would always come through in a pinch if you called the owner directly instead of going through their sales rep. All of that institutional knowledge, all of that expertise, it didn't fit in the ERP systems fields and workflows. So people started to feel like their experience didn't matter anymore. Like the company valued the systems way of doing things more than their way. And they weren't wrong because that's exactly what was happening. The leadership team, they were looking at reports now. They were seeing real time inventory numbers, accurate cost tracking, automated scheduling. They were seeing everything they wanted to see for years. So when people complain that the system was too rigid and too slow, made their jobs harder, leadership's response was basically, "You'll get used to it. This is the new way. We're a modern company now." 3 months after go live, the production manager resigned.

09:50 · Problems with Old Systems and Growth Challenges

Guy had been there 19 years. Started on the shop floor right out of high school. Worked his way up. He knew every machine, every process, every employee. He was the guy who kept things running. And he left because, in his words, he didn't become a production manager to be a data entry clerk. The system had turned his job into typing. He wasn't managing production anymore. He was managing the ERP system. A month later, two of the senior machine operators put in their notice. Both of them over a decade with the company and they went to smaller competitor who was still running on paper systems. They took pay cuts to leave. Think about that for a second.

They took less money to get away from the ERP system. Then the quality manager left. Purchasing manager left. The inside salesperson who knew every customer's preferences and history gone. Within 6 months of go live, the company lost 11 people. Not just any people. Their institutional knowledge. The ones who knew how things really worked. The ones customers asked for by name. the ones who trained everyone else. And the owner was devastated. He couldn't understand what happened. They' done everything right. They'd invested in the company's future. They brought in the best consultants. They chosen the right technology. But somehow they'd lost the people who made this company special in the first place.

And here's the kicker. The ERP system was working perfectly. Inventory accuracy was up. On time delivery was actually improving. Costs were more predictable. All the metrics looked great. But the culture was destroyed. The trust was broken. And the people who remained, they were just going to go through the motions now. Coming in doing what the system told them to do, going home. the magic was gone. So what happened here? Because this story, this exact story plays out in SMBs across the country every single day. Different industries, different systems, same outcome. And it's not because ERP systems are bad. The technology isn't the problem. It's because we implement systems without thinking about the people who have to use them every day.

12:45 · ERP Go-Live: Chaos Despite Doing Everything Right

We focus on process and efficiency and data accuracy. All important things, don't get me wrong, but we completely ignore what these changes mean to the humans involved. Think about it from the employees perspective for a minute. You've been doing your job for 10, 15, 20 years. You're good at it. You know things that aren't written down anywhere. You have instincts that come from experience and you have relationships that make things work when they shouldn't work on paper. And then someone comes in and tells you that the way you've been doing things is wrong, that there's a better way, that you need to do it the systems way. Now, even if they don't say it in those words, that's what they hear.

Because the system doesn't have fields for your instincts. It doesn't have workflows for your relationships, and it certainly doesn't have a button for the creative problem solving that you do 50 times a day. So what you experience is your expertise being devalued, your contribution being minimized, your role being reduced to data entry. Here's the part that really kills culture. Nobody asked you what you thought before they bought the system. Nobody asked you how you do your job, what you need, and what would actually help you, the user. You found out about the new ERP system in a company meeting where they announced the decision was already made. Then consultants showed up and watched you work for a few days taking notes.

Then you went to training sessions where someone taught you how to use software that was already configured. Then on go live day, you were expected to just adapt. At no point in the entire process did anyone treat you like you mattered. They said you mattered. They said this was an investment in your future. They said this will make your job easier. But their actions told a different story. The actions said we know better than you how you should do your job. And this is where Dream Manager changes everything because Dream Manager starts with a completely different premise. It starts with the understanding that your employees are human beings with dreams, aspirations, fears, and needs that go way beyond their job descriptions.

16:20 · The Human Cost: Resignations and Culture Damage

And when you implement change, any change, but especially something as massive as an ERP system, you have to think about how that change affects the whole person, not just the worker, the person. So, let me tell you about a different company real quick. Smaller size, similar industry, also manufacturing. They were also implementing an ERP system, but they'd been running a Dream Manager program for about 18 months before the ERP project even started. And this is where things get interesting because the Dream Manager program had already changed how leadership thought about their people. You see, when you're actively helping your employees achieve their personal dreams, when you're having quarterly conversations with them about their goals and their lives and what matters to them, something shifts.

You stop seeing them as resources to be managed and you start seeing them as people you're investing in. And that shift, that fundamental shift in perspective, it changes how you approach everything else. So when this company decided to implement an ERP system, they did something different. Before they even started the selection process, before they hired consultants or looked at demos, they talked to their employees. a novel idea, not in a town hall meeting, not in a survey, in an actual one- on-one conversation. The Dream Manager sat down with people from every department who asked them questions. What's frustrating about how you do your job now? What takes longer than it should?

What information do you need that you don't currently have? And if you could change one thing about your daily work, what would it be? And here's the critical part. They listen. They didn't defend current systems. They didn't explain why things had to be done a certain way. They just listened and took notes. And what they discovered was fascinating. The problems that leadership thought were the biggest issues, those weren't what employees cared about most. Leadership was focused on inventory accuracy and financial reporting. Employees were frustrated by things like not being able to see the status of customer orders, having to walk across the building to ask questions that should be answerable from their computer, doing the same data entry multiple times because systems didn't talk to each other. So when they started their ERP selection process, they had different criteria than most companies. Yeah. They needed the standard functionality, the financial management, inventory control, all of that jazz, but they also needed a system that solved the actual problems that people were experiencing every day.

And they involved employees in the evaluation process. Machine operators sat in on the software demos. Customer service reps tested different interfaces. and the production scheduler actually used the scheduling module in a demo environment to see if it would work for their real workflows. When they chose a system, people felt like they'd been part of the decision, not just told about it, part of it. And when the implementation started, the Dream Manager was part of the project team, not leading it. The project manager and consultants were still running the technical side, but the Dream Manager was there specifically to focus on the human side. They did something really smart. They identified people in each department who were respected by their peers, who had influence, who others listened to, not necessarily the managers. Sometimes it was the senior operators or experienced staff and they asked these people to be the champions for the change.

20:00 · Why Technology Alone Doesn’t Solve Culture Issues

But they did it differently than most change management approaches. They didn't just train these champions on the system and send them back to convince everyone else. They asked them, "How do we do this in a way that honors what we already know? How do we implement this system without losing what makes us special? And what are you worried about? And how do we address those concerns?" And the champions told them, they said, "We're worried people will feel like they're being watched all the time, and we're worried this system will be so rigid, we can't handle exceptions, and we're worried we'll lose the flexibility that lets us take care of our customers."

So, they designed the implementation around those concerns. They configured the system with more flexibility than typical. They created approval workflows that were fast and didn't make people feel micromanaged. They built in ways to document the institutional knowledge, the special cases, the customer preferences. They made sure experienced employees could still use their judgment. The system just helped them track it. spring training. They didn't just teach people how to click buttons. They showed them why the system worked this way, how it actually makes their jobs easier, where they'd gain time, even if they were spending time on data entry. And when people raised concerns or said, "This won't work for this situation," they didn't dismiss it. They problem solved together. Sometimes they reconfigured the system. Sometimes they realized they needed a different process. And sometimes they agreed to try it one way and revisit it 30 days.

Go live was still chaotic. That's unavoidable. But here's what was different. When people struggled, when things went wrong, when the systems didn't do what they expected, the response wasn't, "You'll figure it out." The response was, "How can we help?" The Dream Manager was on the floor every day for the first month, not solving technical problems. That's what the consultants were for. But checking in with people, asking how they were doing, acknowledging that this was hard, celebrating small wins, and making sure nobody felt alone in that struggle. And they connected it back to people's dreams. Remember in your last Dream Manager meeting, you said you wanted to be less stressed at work? The system is going to eliminate that manual inventory counts that kept you here late.

23:15 · Introducing Dream Manager Approach

Remember, you said you wanted to be better at your job. These reports are going to show you patterns you couldn't see before. And remember, you said you wanted the company to grow so there'd be advancement opportunities. This system is what's going to let us take on bigger customers. They made it personal. They made it relevant. They made it about people's actual lives, not just about business efficiency. Three months after go live, they hadn't lost a single person. Not one resignation. 6 months later, their employee engagement scores were actually higher than before the implementation. And a year later, when they surveyed employees, 78% said the ERP system made their job better. Not just easier, but better, more interesting, more professional, more effective. So, what's the difference between these two stories? It's not the technology.

Both comp both companies implemented good ERP systems. It's not the consulting firm. Both use reputable consultants and implementers. And it's not the budget or the timeline or the training. The difference is whether you thought about the humans or not. Whether you treated your people like assets to be optimized or people to be developed. And this is what the Dream Manager brings to systems implementation. It's not a separate program that runs parallel to your business systems. It's a lens through which you view everything you do. When you're actively engaged in helping your employees achieve their dreams, when you're having regular conversations about what matters to them, and when you've built a culture where people know they're valued as whole human beings, that changes how you implement change. Let me break down the specific ways Dream Manager prevents the ERP culture killer. First, it creates communication channels that actually work.

Most companies only talk about employees business stuff, performance, projects, problems. When you run a Dream Manager program, you have builtin conversations about what's going on in people's lives. So, when you're about to implement something as disruptive as an ERP system, you already have relationships where you can have real conversations, you can ask, "What are you worried about?" And people will tell you the truth because you've already shown them that you care about their actual concerns. Second, it builds trust before you need it. When you spent months or years helping someone achieve their personal dreams, backing them up with resources and support, they trust you. So when you come to them and say, "We need to implement this new system, and it's going to be hard, but it's necessary." They believe you. They don't assume you're just trying to squeeze more productivity out of them. They know you care about their well-being because you've proven it.

26:40 · Success Story: ERP Implementation with Dream Manager

Third, it gives you a framework for managing fear. Change is scary, right? Period. ERP implementations are especially scary because they change how people do their jobs every single day. But Dream Manager has already taught you how to help people move through fear. You've already helped them tackle dreams that scared them. You've already coached them through uncertainty. So you have the skills and the relationship to help them through implementation here. Fourth, it aligns the change with personal growth. When you know someone's dream, you can connect business changes to personal outcomes. You want to be less stressed, the system is going to eliminate these manual processes. You want to advance in your career.

Learning this system is going to make you more valuable. And you want to feel more professional. This is going to give you better tools. You're not just asking them to change for the company's benefit. You're showing them how it serves their dreams, too. Fifth, it creates advocates instead of resistors. When people feel valued as whole humans, when they trust leadership, when they see how changes serve their personal goals, they become advocates. They help others adapt. They speak positively about the changes even when it's hard. They give leadership the benefit of the doubt and that advocacy is what creates momentum through difficult implementations. Sixth, it gives you early warning when things are going wrong. In a traditional implementation, people suffer in silence until they quit.

In a Dream Manager culture, people tell you when something's not working because they trust you'll listen so you can fix problems early instead of losing people later. Now, let me be really clear about something. Dream Manager doesn't make ERP systems implementations easy. It's still hard. It's still disruptive. People still struggle with new systems and new processes. There are still technical problems and learning curves and frustrating days. Dream Manager doesn't eliminate that. What it does prevent is the culture damage. It prevents the trust breakdown. It prevents the exodus of your best people and it prevents the transformation of your engaged workforce and the people who are just going through the motions.

And here's what's really powerful. When you implement systems through a Dream Manager lens, you don't just avoid damage. You actually strengthen your culture because you prove to people that even when you're making hard changes, even when you're focused on business needs, you still care about them as humans and you still value their input and you still support their dreams. And that proof, that demonstration that they matter even during difficult times, that's what builds unshakable loyalty. The manufacturer I told you about at the beginning, the one that lost 11 people, they eventually figured this out about a year after their disastrous go live. They brought in a Dream Manager, not to fix the ERP system. They've already stabilized that but to fix the culture that the implementation had broken and it took time a lot of time to rebuild trust. Some of the people who left they never came back. The institutional knowledge was gone forever.

31:00 · Key Principles: Communication, Trust, Fear Management

The two years they transformed into a different kind of company. a company that learned that technology is only as good as the culture it operates in. The second manufacturer, the one that did it right from the jump, they're three years post implementation now, and they've become a model for how to do this. They've actually started consulting with other companies in their industry association, helping them avoid the mistakes that are so common. And their message is simple. Invest in your people first, then invest in your systems. Or better yet, invest in both simultaneously. Make sure every systems decision is filtered through the question, how does this affect our people's lives? Because here's the bottom line. ERP systems are necessary. If you're running a small to midsize business that wants to grow, that wants to compete, that wants to be sustainable, you need modern business systems. You need real time data, integrated processes, automated workflows. That is not optional anymore.

But how you implement those systems, that's entirely optional. You can do it the traditional way and risk losing the people who make your company special. or you can do it the Dream Manager way and actually strengthen your culture while you modernize your operations. And this pattern, this integration of human development with business systems, it applies to everything else we're going to talk about this season. Financial systems, HR platforms, operations management, CRM, all of it. Every business system you implement, every process you change, every technology you adopt, it has a human impact. And if you ignore that impact, if you focus solely on the business case and the technical requirements, you will damage your culture.

33:50 · Aligning Change with Personal Growth

Maybe not catastrophically, maybe not all at once, but damage accumulates. Dream Manager isn't a feel-good program that you run on the side while you do real business. It's the foundation that makes your real business sustainable. It's what allows you to implement the systems and processes you need without losing the people that make those systems and processes actually work. So, if you're listening to this and you're planning on an ERP implementation or any major systems change for that that matter, ask yourself these questions. Have I talked to the people who will actually use the system every day? Do I understand what they're worried about? Have I connected this change to their personal growth?

Do I have enough trust built up that they'll believe me when I say this is necessary? And am I prepared to support them as humans, not just train them as workers? And if the answer to any of those questions is no, pause. Before you sign the contract, before you set the go live date, before you start the implementation, invest in your people first. Build a Dream Manager culture. Create the foundation of trust and communication that will carry you through the change. Because the ERP culture killer is real. I've seen it destroy companies, but it doesn't have to be that way. When you integrate Dream Manager principles into your systems implementation, when you treat your people like humans with dreams and fears and needs, and when you design change around people instead of around process, you get the best of both worlds. You get the efficiency and capability of modern systems and you keep the culture and loyalty and engagement that makes your company special. That's what human systems integration is all about. And that's what we're going to explore all season long.

36:20 · Building Advocates and Preventing Cultural Damage

Next episode, we're talking about financial systems, how Dream Manager changes the conversation around budgeting, compensation, and how you think about investing in people. You're going to hear a story about a CFO who completely transformed his company, approached financial planning once he understood what employee dreams actually cost and what they return. But for now, if this episode resonated with you, if you've lived through a painful systems implementation, or if you're trying to figure out how to avoid that pain, I want to help. We're building a platform called the DreamCompass that's specifically designed to integrate Dream Manager principles into your business operations, and it's launching in Q4.

and we're looking for companies who want to be part of the early access program. And I want to talk about how to approach your specific implementation, whether it's ERP or any other major change. Reach out. I work with small mid-size businesses every day on exactly this kind of integration. Sometimes it's full Dream Manager implementation. Sometimes it's fractional support for specific projects. But either way, the goal is the same. Help you implement the systems you need without losing the culture you've built. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Dream Dividend. If this episode was valuable, share it with another SMB owner or leader who's struggling with systems implementation.

38:00 · Human Systems Integration: The Big Picture

Let's change how businesses think about technology and people. We'll see you next time. Thank you. >> If this episode made you uncomfortable, good. That means you are paying attention. The future belongs to leaders who stop managing people like assets and start investing in them like humans. See you next time. And remember, dreams aren't frivolous. Ignoring them is.