Batesville Casket Company

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The Customer

Nearing its centennial mark, Batesville Casket Company (a subsidiary of Hillenbrand Industries) is the United States' largest manufacturer of metal and hardwood burial caskets. It is also a leading manufacturer of cremation urns and caskets, as well as related support services. They provide more than 500 different styles and colors of caskets, many with customized interior designs and exterior corner castings. Headquartered in Batesville, Indiana, the company has over 3500 employees, with 5 plants in 5 states, and numerous distribution centers across the country. Batesville Casket's white-and-green tandem tractor-trailers are a familiar sight on highways in the United States. Since 1976, Batesville has also operated the Living Memorial® tree planting program, which is the largest private reforestation project in the United States.

The Challenge

Batesville implemented the J.D. Edwards Enterprise Resource Planning system, including DSI's barcode scanners and Numetrix's Advanced Planning System for forecasting and supply chain planning. This system replaced numerous standalone legacy systems that had become obsolete. Intelligo was challenged to provide customized end-user documentation and training materials in two and a half months, and provide classroom end-user training for 250+ users from five locations across six weeks immediately before the big-bang go-live. Several dozen of these users were traveling from other states (including Quebec, Canada), and this required careful scheduling to avoid having students make more than one week-long visit to the central training facilities in Batesville Indiana.

The Solution

Intelligo participated in Batesville's system testing, where our consultants ran the transactions, captured screens with Batesville-specific data, and customized our standard Content Library of work instructions to match Batesville's transactions and business processes. Intelligo also quickly drew Microsoft Visio process flows to make the sometimes-drastic changes in Batesville's business processes easy for the users to understand. Batesville's user groups were small enough that many users "wear more than one hat," so we took careful time and consideration in scheduling each user by name and job function to attend only the classes that she needed. For out-of-town students, we were careful to schedule all of their classes in one week, so that they needed to make only one trip.

For Phases 1 and 2, Intelligo wrote the custom end-user documentation and training materials in Microsoft Word for ease of maintenance, and deployed it on the team server using Word "home pages" which could be accessed by all users to navigate through the documentation. This suited Batesville's requirements for maximum utility and ease of maintenance with no technical support. We also delivered the bulk of the training at the Batesville headquarters with some assistance from Batesville's trainers. For Phase 3, Intelligo wrote the documentation and training materials, and Batesville's trainers delivered the training at each site as they went live in sequence.

Intelligo's Value-Add

Intelligo's experience in delivering custom documentation and training alleviated Batesville's resource shortage, and allowed the implementation team to focus on the implementation of the software instead of the training effort. This saved Batesville tens of thousands of dollars and 12 man-months of time over obtaining and training internal resources to do the work. By scheduling and training students from multiple sites at a central facility, Intelligo helped Batesville avoid significant expenditures to upgrade its network bandwidth and the need to install or rent training facilities at each site.

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