How an Internal ERP Champion Inspires Adoption

This one skips the slides almost entirely — it’s Frank and Chris Pouliot having a genuinely unplanned conversation about a question that comes up in nearly every ERP implementation: who should be your internal champion, and why does it matter so much? Chris brings the implementation and continuous-improvement side (100+ projects, 25 years in the industry), while Frank brings the sales-to-implementation bridge perspective, and together they build out something close to a job posting for the role — then spend just as much time explaining why several “obvious” qualifications on that posting (an IT degree, deep SQL skills, experience with a big-name Tier 1 ERP) aren’t actually what makes someone succeed. The real test cases are what make this worth the listen: a change-resistant employee who did all his calculations by hand for decades, won over not by argument but by a fair side-by-side trial; a hire hand-picked from Tier 1 ERP experience who tried imposing controls that didn’t fit a one-off custom shop and didn’t last; and a champion whose personal agenda quietly diverged from leadership’s actual vision, undermining the whole project. If you’re trying to figure out who in your company should actually own this role — or whether you need to hire for it at all — this conversation lays out the reasoning better than a checklist would.

What You’ll Learn In This Webinar

Chapter 1 — Defining the Internal Champion Role

After a quick Genius overview (30+ years in business, 120+ employees, 96% retention, a North America-wide footprint, and a focus on custom fabrication — configure-to-order, design-to-order, engineer-to-order), Frank introduces Chris Pouliot, Genius’s Director of Professional Services (25 years in the industry, over 100 projects run with his team), and frames the session around five loose topics: why a champion matters, who makes a good one, how they actually operate day to day, real cases from experience, and whether the role needs to be a dedicated hire. Chris’s opening case for the role: a strong champion is the “glue” holding a project together for a 50-150 employee SME, and builds long-term autonomy so the company isn’t always dependent on its ERP supplier. Frank extends this past implementation itself — without one spokesperson holding the line on direction, a company can drift without anyone steering.

Chapter 2 — Champion Versus Super Users

Chris draws a clear line: “super users” are departmental specialists — one per silo or module, deeply knowledgeable about their own area — while the champion is a single, higher-level person who understands the whole business: process flow, money flow, information flow, and leadership’s actual mission and vision. The champion is the one consistent point of contact for the ERP supplier and the one who relays information internally so things don’t go sideways. A super user can become the champion, but the two roles aren’t the same thing.

Chapter 3 — Managing Internal Change Resistance

The champion needs to actively manage change — not just implement it, but unify super users and departments around shared priorities rather than siloed wins. Chris shares a real example: a steel-structure company implementing inventory-optimized cut-list software ran into a longtime employee (in his late 50s or early 60s) who’d done the same calculations by hand for decades and didn’t trust the system to do better. Rather than force the switch, the champion let him keep working on paper in parallel for two to three months, comparing his numbers against the software’s until he was convinced it was faster and just as accurate. Frank’s takeaway: the person most resistant to change is often the one worth convincing first, since winning them over tends to bring everyone else along — and doing that well means setting a real, measurable validation period rather than just asking for blind trust.

“You’re making your devil’s advocate your strongest ally at some point.” — Frank

Chapter 4 — Ideal Candidate Profile Analysis

Frank shares an informal “job posting” profile he built by researching typical champion candidate advice and cross-checking it with ChatGPT, explicitly framed for small-to-medium manufacturers — and just as explicitly caveated that this isn’t necessarily a brand-new, full-time hire.

Chapter 5 — Evaluating Educational and IT Backgrounds

Both push back on the common advice to look for someone with an IT or computer science background: Chris argues IT specialists are often technically strong but miss the “big picture” of how the shop actually runs, unless they’ve spent real years embedded in the business. Formal degrees matter less than deep, cross-departmental tenure — someone who’s rotated through purchasing, sales, or the shop floor over many years often knows the business better than anyone. Both agree an industrial engineering or process-and-methods background tends to produce strong champions, and Frank cites two successful champions he’s personally seen who came from industrial design training rather than IT.

Chapter 6 — Risks of Tier One Experience

A caution against overvaluing candidates with experience at large “Tier 1” ERPs (like SAP or Oracle): those systems’ controls and processes are built for a different scale entirely, and can create real friction if imposed on a small or medium custom manufacturer without adapting. Frank’s real example: a hire tried implementing full-rotation inventory controls with location and serial tracking that simply didn’t fit a one-off, custom production environment, leading to ongoing conflict and eventual termination. Chris notes the risk is lower if that person has already been embedded in the company for a while (and has absorbed its actual reality) versus being brought in cold right at project kickoff with assumptions already formed elsewhere.

Chapter 7 — Essential Business and Soft Skills

Both agree deep database, SQL, or programming skill is overrated as a requirement — modern tools like Genius Analytics and SSRS make this less necessary, and a curious champion can learn configuration with consultant support rather than needing to be the most technical person in the room. What matters more: understanding business process and having strong problem-solving skills (echoing the earlier pen-and-paper example), clear communication (translating technical jargon for both internal teams and external consultants/support), project management and leadership skills, already being a natural “go-to person” in the organization, being a team player, and a capacity for continuous learning — including staying involved in onboarding whenever a super user or the champion’s own eventual successor needs training.

Chapter 8 — Champion Execution and Project Management

Chris outlines three practical elements of the role: project management (coordinating many users and licenses without disrupting daily operations, whether during initial implementation or an ongoing continuous-improvement phase), staying in sync with executive priorities while relaying floor-level feedback upward, and generally directing people and communication day to day. Frank’s metaphor: the champion holds the tiller steady while purchasing wants to steer one way (better vendor communication) and sales wants to steer another (a better pipeline) — leveling everyone up to one prioritized direction with ownership’s buy-in. He adds the value of simple, role-specific dashboards and KPIs (like tracking PO volume or price variance with clear thresholds) so success is actually measured, not assumed — the same validation logic used to win over the change-resistant employee earlier. Chris adds that the champion also serves as first-line user support internally, and Frank connects this to staying in touch with the ERP supplier’s account or customer success manager so support requests get properly prioritized instead of getting lost among several disconnected super-user tickets.

Chapter 9 — Real World Implementation Case Studies

Two real examples: a project where the assigned champion had a personal agenda that didn’t align with leadership’s actual vision, creating friction throughout the project and eventually leading to that person’s departure — reinforcing how critical alignment with business vision really is; and a longtime customer who, when investing to take their ERP usage to the next level, hired someone with a Tier 1 enterprise IT profile right before starting the project, which (tying back to Chapter 6) didn’t fit — leading Genius, with Chris directly involved in candidate profiling and the hiring process, to help the customer find a better match instead.

Chapter 10 — Ideal ERP Champion Candidate Profile

Continuing that same case: the eventual successful hire had broad experience across company sizes and multiple ERP systems, and told the customer directly in his interview that he didn’t know or care what “tier” Genius was — he was ready to learn the business and its processes from scratch to make the system work. After a two-month Genius Academy-style boot camp, he’s been successfully driving continuous improvement six months in.

Chapter 11 — Internal vs External Champion Hiring

Chris’s core stance: hiring someone brand new specifically for the champion role is usually hard to justify, since it typically isn’t a full-time job on its own. It tends to work better as an added responsibility — often just 5-10 hours a week — for an existing “go-to” operations employee who already handles some of the role informally, with the exception of genuine phase-two growth investments like the case above (where fit still matters more than raw ERP pedigree). Frank closes by recommending that anyone unsure who to select internally reach out to their ERP supplier or service provider’s customer success team for guidance, and previews that this unscripted, conversational format may return for future topics.