Michelman Inc.

Wednesday November 16, 2022

Michelman Inc : Oracle UPK content conversion to Opus success

Michelman is a global developer and manufacturer of environmentally friendly advanced materials for industry, offering solutions for the coatings, printing & packaging and industrial manufacturing markets, formed in 1949 and is headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio. Michelman has production facilities in North America, Europe and Asia, product development and technical service centers in several major global markets. The company’s surface additives and polymeric binders are used by leading manufacturers around the world to enhance performance attributes and add value in applications including wood and floor care products, metal and industrial coatings, paints, varnishes, inks, fibers and composites. Michelman is also well-known as an innovator in the development of barrier and functional coatings, as well as digital printing-press primers that are used in the production of consumer and industrial packaging, paper products, labels, and commercially printed materials.

In 2018, Trish Muir, the Director of Enterprise Resource Planning knew that their eLearning solution Oracle UPK was coming to the end of its life and needed to replace it to support their global employee base using IT applications such as JD Edwards. Muir considered tools such as Ancile uPerform, Datango & Camtasia, but settled on Epilogue Opus and was assisted through the selection process by their system integrator.

Muir was tasked with producing all educational, end user support and change content for their JDE installation, focusing on having all employees become self-sufficient on support in Finance, Human Resources and Supply Chain Management. Muir knew that one of the most important aspects was the ongoing, easy maintenance and consumption of that content for those JDE areas.

Having used Oracle UPK extensively, Michelman were able to implement Epilogue Opus in under 3 weeks in 2022 and have over 65 Subject Matter Experts creating content in Opus: a testament to the effectiveness of Muir’s change management and communications. Looking forward with Opus there are no restrictions to any other IT application , such as UKG, MS Power BI, Salesforce & TM1 at Michelman.

Michelman also looked at other solutions including Adobe Suite, Whatfix, TTS and Epilogue Opus, and states “We took advise from our long standing Edwards’ system Integrator and tested all offerings thoroughly, and because of the content was 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”. Muir 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 is like UPK on steroids“ Muir 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 factor for Michelman”.

Muir continues “The Michelman IT Security 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 Security Team were heavily involved at every step” Michelman also have a JDE upgrade in Q1 2023 and using Opus on RF Readers and Tablet PCs throughout the global business units.

Michelman 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

Michelman 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 live date
• Reduce time to proficiency
• There for new employees
• Training uses IT application system screen
• No end user disruption in migration from UPK

Michelman 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.

Highlights at Michelman Inc.

• Opus is now the JDE end user support platform for all staff

• Replaced UPK in 2022 in under 3 weeks

• IT applications include JD Edwards, UKG, TM1 & MS Power BI

• Michelman have over 270 documents created and increasing

• Michelman have over 65 SME users

• Opus will support multiple languages, including double- byte character set