Communications That Carried a Global ERP Transformation
How a structured, multilingual communication strategy built the organizational readiness that turned a four-country SAP go-live into a high-adoption launch.
A global consumer goods company — more than a century old, with a multi-billion-dollar product portfolio spanning multiple categories and international markets — set out to standardize how its international division operated. The vehicle was a comprehensive SAP deployment across four Latin American markets, targeting a single go-live date shared across all countries simultaneously.
The technology was only half the challenge. Hundreds of end users across four countries would need to understand why their familiar processes were changing, develop the skills to work in a fundamentally new system, and perform competently on the first day — without a safety net. In a multi-country program, that kind of preparedness does not happen by accident. It requires architecture.
Taligens designed and executed the communications and organizational readiness strategy from program launch through go-live and hypercare — reaching every audience, from executive leadership to shop-floor employees, in a channel and language they could actually receive.
The Starting Point
Before communications began, the program faced a textbook organizational readiness deficit. The company's international markets had long operated with significant autonomy. Each country had its own processes, its own language for the work, and its own relationship with headquarters. The idea of a centrally mandated, standards-first transformation was, for many local leaders, somewhere between skepticism and resistance.
Shop-floor and plant employees — a substantial share of the people who would be using SAP on day one — had no reliable mechanism for receiving corporate program updates. They were not on email distribution lists. They did not attend town halls. And no one had yet established a practice of translating change communications into Spanish as a first-class deliverable, not an afterthought.
Without a deliberate communications architecture, the program risked a scenario common to large multi-country transformations: leaders technically briefed, end users unprepared, and go-live day a scramble.
The Approach
We built the strategy around a four-rung change-journey model — Awareness, Understanding, Buy-in, Ownership — and treated it as a design specification, not a framework to reference in a kickoff deck. Every communication was designed against a specific audience and a specific rung. An email that moved a country finance director from Understanding to Buy-in was a different instrument — in tone, depth, and ask — from one moving an end user from Awareness to Understanding.
This discipline solved a problem that afflicts most program communications: over-investing in early announcements, where the news is novel and attention is high, while under-investing in the final weeks, where the load is greatest and patience is shortest. The change-journey map told us exactly where each audience was at every point in the program calendar — and what they needed to move forward.
We structured the audience architecture around eight coded segments, each with a documented cadence: Core Project Team (weekly), Extended Team (bi-weekly), Global International Division (monthly or event-driven), Senior Leadership (monthly plus steering meetings), Targeted End Users (phased by training wave), Training audiences (calendar-driven), Template subscribers (on-demand), and All-Staff in Wave 1 countries (country-led, in Spanish). No audience defaulted to another audience's cadence.
Three Workstreams That Carried the Change
Eight Segments, Eight Cadences, No Cross-Talk
We refused the common shortcut of treating "the organization" as a single audience. A core project team needs weekly tactical alignment. A country general manager needs a monthly leadership brief with the political implications made explicit. A shop-floor employee needs a poster on the bulletin board and a conversation with a Key User. Conflating them produces noise for some and silence for others. We kept the channels clean.
Templates That Made the Program Look Like One Program
The program ran under a consistent visual identity from launch to post-go-live — a branded presentation template, a memo format, a monthly project update structure, and a five-bullet talking-points brief for country leaders. The talking-points brief was among the highest-value assets: it gave country leaders the language to speak with one voice on the transformation without having to independently formulate a position on every development.
A Bi-Weekly Poster Calendar for Non-Desk Workers
We built a deliberate poster cadence for plant and office bulletin boards, with a bi-weekly topic rotation covering what the transformation was, what it meant for daily work, who the Key Users were, training progress, and go-live readiness. Topics were centrally coordinated, translated into Spanish, and posted on a fixed schedule so all four countries displayed the same message in the same week — because shop-floor employees are prime audience for a transformation that changes how inventory, production, and delivery work.
In a multi-country transformation, silence is not neutrality — it is the gap into which resistance grows. Every audience we did not reach deliberately was an audience that would fill the void with rumor, assumption, or apathy.
Four Phases of the Communications Strategy
The communications architecture was built in four sequential phases, each compounding the organizational readiness established by the prior phase.
- Phase 1 — Discovery and Audience Mapping
Structured stakeholder interviews in all four Wave 1 countries, using a consistent guide, surfaced the specific concerns, information gaps, and trust levels of each audience. The output was not a list of names — it was a documented readiness baseline and a change-journey target for each segment.
- Phase 2 — Channel Architecture and Brand System
A complete branded asset library was built before the first major communication went out: templates, talking-point formats, poster layouts, and a Spanish-language employee newsletter format. This upfront investment meant every subsequent deliverable could be produced in a fraction of the time and would look like it belonged to the same program.
- Phase 3 — Wave-Based Deployment and Cadence Execution
Communications were tracked and executed on schedule — including poster updates, monthly leadership briefs, a Spanish-language employee newsletter, training countdown messaging, and a full go-live communications package. Mid-program cancellations were managed as active prioritization decisions, not defaults.
- Phase 4 — Final-Mile Engagement and Gamification
In the weeks before go-live, a campaign converted the tail of the training curve from obligation into participation. Training completion percentages were posted publicly on bulletin boards, creating a visible competitive dynamic between plants and countries. Go-live day had no significant communication gaps or workforce surprises.
What the Communications Delivered
The program went live in four countries simultaneously, on the planned date, with no material workforce surprises.
Four-country go-live with no communication gaps
Every audience — from country general managers to shop-floor operators — received tailored, sequenced communications throughout the program lifecycle. No workforce segment arrived at go-live day uninformed about what was changing or why.
A reusable communications playbook for subsequent waves
The branded templates, poster library, newsletter format, talking-points model, and audience segmentation framework were retained intact and redeployed for the next program wave — compressing setup time and preserving the organizational trust built in the first wave.
Training completion made publicly visible and competitive
The gamification campaign converted the final training push from a compliance exercise into a race. Completion percentages posted on bulletin boards created accountability at the plant level — the right pressure, applied at the right moment, with the right transparency.
Spanish-first delivery as a strategic commitment
The employee newsletter and all plant-floor communications were produced in Spanish as primary deliverables — written by in-country contributors to preserve authentic voice, not translated from English after the fact. Language equity built credibility with the workforce that mattered most.
Is this kind of engagement right for your organization?
This approach is built for programs facing the following conditions:
- Your transformation reaches employees across multiple countries or languages — and your communications strategy is not yet built for that complexity.
- Shop-floor or non-desk workers are critical to go-live success but have historically been left out of program communications.
- Country or business-unit leaders need to speak with one voice on the transformation, but do not have a shared language or talking-point system.
- You are approaching a go-live date and workforce readiness is lagging behind technical readiness.
- A prior transformation left behind a communications void — and this one cannot afford the same outcome.
Ready to build a communications strategy that reaches every person who needs to be ready?
Let's talk about how to structure the organizational readiness work that turns a technical go-live into a human one.