Acme Brick Case Study, a Berkshire Hathaway Company
Friday May 5, 2023Acme Brick Company : Oracle UPK content conversion to Opus
Acme Brick, a Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary, was founded in 1891 and produces and distributes building materials for its construction customers in a variety of colors, shapes and sizes. It operates more than 20 brick manufacturing plants, and additionally manufactures all-brick wood burning fireplace systems. Acme Brick operates a family of companies, including American Tile Supply (residential, commercial and natural stone tiles), Featherlite (masonry materials), IBP Glass Block Grid System (glass blocks set in custom-made aluminum grids) and Texas Quarries (limestone).
In 2022, Scott Moran, the Manager of Enterprise IT Systems was tasked with replacing their eLearning solution Oracle UPK as it would become unsupported by Oracle at the end of the year and Acme needed materials to support their employee base using IT Applications such as JD Edwards. Acme had been using UPK for nearly 20 years and had nearly 500 UPK Topics to convert. Moran considered tools such as Ancile uPerform, Datango & Camtasia, but settled on Epilogue Opus and was assisted through the selection process by their internal UPK Team.
Moran focused on salvaging UPK content, and wanted all educational, end user support and change content for their JDE installation, evolving to have all employees become self-sufficient in ongoing creation and support in Finance, Human Resources and Supply Chain Management. Moran knew that one of the most important aspects was the ongoing, easy maintenance and consumption of that content for those JDE areas for all their business units.
Having used Oracle UPK extensively for 20 years, Acme Brick were able to implement Epilogue Opus in under 3 weeks in 2023 and are planning to have Business Units’ Subject Matter Experts creating content in Opus : as Acme Brick continue progressive change management and change communications. Looking forward with Opus there are no restrictions to any other IT Application
Acme Brick also looked at other solutions including Adobe Suite, Whatfix, TTS, Ancile uPerform, Datango and Epilogue Opus, and states “We took advise the UPK experts at Epilogue and tested all offerings thoroughly, and because Opus could salvage and convert our UPK content in bulk, and now is 100% web based with Opus stored in one location via AWS, as well as the ability to use the Opus Content Library as an LCMS, the decision was straightforward”. Moran continues “Opus allows us to have a lean content development process, using the SMEs to author the content, then my Team reviews, edits and publishes from one screen and all the Opus outputs are updated : the Opus Solution saved our UPK lives“ Moran continues “Opus was also the clear choice on UPK conversion, in testing and security. In fact, some of the competitors we looked at to Opus do not have a UPK converting process, which was a major factor for Acme Brick”.
Moran continues “The Acme Brick IT Team are focused on keeping all the system data and information safe, and our due diligence for the thousands of end users meant that the IT Team were involved at every step”.
Acme Brick likes the ease of editing in Opus, UPK conversion utility & language conversion functionality.
Additional training benefits include Quizzes & Tests on competency of Health and Human Services employees, as well as Sandbox access via Opus Simulations.
Digital Adoption Business Transformation
Acme Brick had several Key Business Objectives including migration away from Oracle UPK and increased user adoption. These objectives were mirrored in Learning offerings:
- Training covers all employees on a variety of Applications
- Training material available close to Go Live & Post Go Live Dates, including Follow Me
- Reduce time to proficiency in employees
- Content is there for new employees
- Training uses IT Application system screens
- No end user disruption in migration from UPK
Highlights at Acme Brick include
- Opus is now the JDE end user support platform for all staff
- Replaced all UPK in 2023 in under 1 day
- Acme Brick have over 150 Documents created and increasing
- Acme Brick have SME Users creating and maintaining
- Opus will support multiple languages
Acme Brick evaluated other leaning solutions such as ANCILE uPerform, Camtasia and Datango but after due diligence settled on Epilogue Opus for a variety of reasons including ease of use, just-in-time training & support, centralized content, and bulk conversion of Oracle UPK.
