Transcript of Reily Foods Company Customer Testimonial Video

[00:00]  My name is Paul Forney. I'm the VP of Finance and IT at Reily Foods. So, I run both the finance department and the IT department for our company. Reily Foods is a food and beverage manufacturer based in New Orleans, Louisiana, founded in 1902, mainly produce coffee, tea mayo, but also distribute some other things such as hot sauce, flour, and chili.

[00:29]  We are currently in AX09 and we decided to upgrade to D365, the cloud environment. We are leveraging mainly ISVs, trying to use out of the box functionality for D365.

[00:38]  I'm Renee LaCour. I'm the Associate Director of process improvement and data analytics at Reily Foods, and then in terms of the D365 implementation, I'm the overall project manager. I think one of the largest training challenges that we had prior to the restart of our implementation project was that we didn't really do training. So the philosophy at that time was really take our current business processes and make the system work for us rather than reevaluating our business processes to fit industry standard and best practices.

[01:07]  The platform (pay-as-you-go) makes it really easy. The first thing to note is you don't have to put your whole organization in it. They don't all have to be members and active subscribers all at once. So we were able to go in phases of, I think around 20 to 25 people at a time, where we took our lead D365 team through it, let them complete it. Then went maybe to more of the subject matter experts and now we're in the phase where we're letting the end users get up to speed.

[01:34]  So the micro-courses let everybody learn as they see fit or the best way that they can. If you wanna do one or two courses because you have 10 minutes and you just wanna knock one or two out, you can. If you wanna do a whole module at one time and maybe you have an hour or a lunch break or something like that, you can do the, you know, the 10 courses in one module and get it all done at one time so you don't forget. But everything is flexible and lets you cater it to that individual's needs.

[02:05] Learning paths make it really easy for us to delegate or attach trainings to each individual. So if you have an AP team, you know exactly what learning path that you should give them. At a smaller company like ours, a lot of people have hybrid roles. So it made it real easy that if they crossed into AR and AP, you could give them both. If it was somebody that may be a manager that needed to know all of them, you knew that whatever the people underneath them were doing to, to assign to them.

[02:36]  So the learning paths made it extremely easy to not have to go through and figure out exactly what you should assign to them or just let people get in the system and say, go click on the ones that make sense to you. We knew exactly what they needed to accomplish and what they needed to learn.

[02:51]  I think the assessments were definitely beneficial. I know a handful of our team members might have missed a question or two and would have to go back and rewatch it just to help make sure that it reinforces core concepts for everyone. It also helped us make sure that we're retaining that information over time and having some of those assessments midway through those learning paths after a few micro courses and then at the end of the learning path that kind of consumes all of that information that you've learned were extremely beneficial.

[03:17]  The dashboards were extremely beneficial, at least from a project management and team lead standpoint for myself. So I was able to create custom dashboards and reports within Item by Item that then I set up subscriptions to send to myself every day at 9:00 AM. So I could see progress at our teams making throughout the training process. We also could see the last time that the user logged in or their progress or overall assessment scores for the learning path, which was very beneficial to make sure that our team's actually making progress. We were also able to identify some team members that weren't logging in for two or three months that should have been completing those trainings. And we were able to address those as needed. But it really provided a lot of information for us to really monitor the progress on training and make sure that our teams truly retaining that information.

[04:03]  Gamification helped us a lot. We have a very competitive organization, especially when we were doing the leads and the SMEs. They were always looking at the leaderboard, their KPIs. If somebody was ahead of them, they would work on the weekends to do the trainings to make sure they were in the lead. By the time Monday rolled around, we did give them small prizes and a raffle to make it, you know, a little bit more fun and give them a reward. And it also allowed us to identify some superstars that we may not have been aware of that were hidden in our organization that wanted to learn more, asked for more, even more than they were given and completed it extremely quickly, and were eager to learn.

[04:45]  The pay-as-you-go model is ideal. To be honest, if it wasn't available, we may have never started this endeavor with Item by Item. So it allowed us to know, okay, we're gonna do 20 users in the first phase and then the next phase we have 20, but maybe in the following phase we don't have 20 while we're finishing up, you know, certain parts of the implementation and maybe it's 10. So it allowed us to kind of be dynamic and be adapting to where we were in the project without saying we need to have all a hundred in there from start to finish, which helped us control costs for sure.

[05:22]  Our end users founds the out of the box courses were very beneficial, especially because it was specific to their individual roles. So we were able to identify an AP analyst needs to have these specific learning paths assigned to them and it was very relatable to their jobs. So even before we started concept overviews with our implementation partner, it gave our team really a sense of the out of the box functionality as it relates to them and they're able to pace it as they go themselves. So whether that would be, you know, scheduling an hour each week or an hour each day to complete the trainings, it made it more flexible for our team to complete them.

[05:59]  The overall relationship with Item by Item has been fantastic. Having check-ins every two to three weeks with the team to make sure that if we're addressing any questions around licensing or any new trainings that are released, it was great to have those conversations and just brief check-ins every few weeks to make sure that all of our training needs are being addressed.

[06:20] I think having a phased approach with training has definitely been a big win for us. That's something I would recommend to other customers as well. Making sure that you're not training all your team members all at once. You wanna make sure that your core team understands that functionality in case any of your downstream team members have questions that maybe aren't addressed in a training or that they don't know where to find a specific training or a lesson regarding what they need to look at.

[06:47]  The top things I would tell a customer to focus on when they were starting their training was to start early and earlier than they think they need to. So we started I think two or three months before we really ever started the project, but everybody was up to speed and you underestimate how much time it actually takes you to train entirely, you know, like train appropriately. So start early. I would say also keep it consistent and keep it standardized for everyone because everybody's talking on the same page. When you finally get in those conversations with your implementation partner, everybody's using the same vocabulary, they have the same experience, they have all clicked the same buttons and navigated through the same windows. So I would say, you know, start early consistency and standardization or the the top three things.

[07:31]  I would a 100% recommend IBI to other companies that are, even if they're already live in the environment or planning to go live. It greatly helped our organization, got everybody ready, prepared, and educated everybody so that we were on the same page. And with all the features and the KPIs as everybody loves these days, made it really easy for a manager and for the employees to do everything they needed to do and make sure we did it right.