The person who knew how month-end really closed, why MRP was set the way it was, and which screen to use when the receipt doesn't post — retired, or took another job. The replacement is capable and has never seen Fourth Shift. Vendor classes need a headcount most single plants can't fill, and nobody offers one-on-one. We do. Four two-hour sessions per topic, on your own system, scheduled around their week — sandbox first, then their real work with us watching. Recorded, with work instructions and reference materials tailored to what was taught. You keep all of it.
Most plants running Fourth Shift have one or two people who carry it: the planner who has been there eighteen years, the controller who built the month-end checklist, the IT person who knows which job runs at 2 a.m. and what to do when it doesn't. When one of them leaves, the plant discovers that the manuals describe the product and the person described the plant.
The vendor's training model was built for a different era — a scheduled classroom, a minimum number of seats, a generic database. That model, respectfully, no longer fits a mature product with a dispersed install base of single plants. A class needs a headcount most sites can't fill, and even when one runs, it can't teach your item master or your close.
Our principal has taught Fourth Shift and administered it since 1996, and we've learned something about how it's learned: two hours lands, four hours doesn't. Training the replacement is, in our experience, the highest-return work a plant can buy in the first ninety days after a departure — because the alternative is six months of expensive guessing, and the guesses end up in the data.
Nobody needs a tour of every module in one sitting. Each series covers one area of the system the way your plant actually runs it, with the checks that catch the mistakes the last person learned the hard way. Take the ones you need.
How the modules fit together, where the data flows, what drives what. For the new IT administrator, the new plant manager, or anyone who needs the map before the territory.
Item master, BOM and routing fields that drive planning; MRP parameters and why they're set; action messages and when to trust them; work orders, shop status, completions; the weekly rhythm.
Vendors and item-vendor setup, PO lifecycle, receiving and inspection, PPV; locations and transactions, cycle counting, physical inventory with IAMS, VisiBar and VisiWatch data collection.
Customers and pricing, order entry, allocation and picking, shipping and invoicing, backorders and returns — and the reports that tell you what's late before the customer does.
Invoicing, cash application, credit and collections; vouchers, three-way match, payments and vendor statements. One series, because the two meet at month-end.
The month-end close in order: subledgers, the GL module comm, cost roll, WIP and variance reports; what to check before you post and what to do when the two don't agree.
Its own topic: configuration, custom BOMs and routings, quoting and costing of one-offs, and keeping the item master sane while doing it.
Engineering change, revision control, effectivity, and the handoff between engineering and the planning data it feeds.
Night processing, backups proven by restore, users and security, the custom programs and Data Import templates nobody documented, patches, and the runbook for the job that fails at 2 a.m. Monitoring to go with it →
Who's learning, which topic. We go through your configuration and data first.
The topic end to end on a copy of your system, where mistakes are free.
The trainee's actual transactions, with us watching, until it has stuck.
Exceptions, month-end, the questions that came up. Recorded like the rest.
Recordings, AI-tailored work instructions, a reference set, written follow-up.
Who's learning, which topic, when they start, and what the previous holder did that nobody else can. Then we go through your configuration, data and any existing procedures so the sessions are about your plant, not the product.
Screen-shared on your Fourth Shift. Sandbox first, so mistakes are free; then some of the trainee's actual work with us watching, so we both know it has stuck. Two hours because that's what people retain. Between sessions: exercises on real transactions.
Every session is recorded. From the recordings we produce work instructions tailored to what was actually taught — screen by screen, in your terms, with the checks — plus a reference set for the topic. AI does the transcription and first draft; we make sure it's right.
Anything we couldn't answer in the room gets answered in writing. Optional: a few hours a month for the questions that only show up at the first month-end or the first physical. Then they're on their own — which was the point.
Teaching a role on a real system tends to surface the things the departed expert had quietly absorbed: the MRP parameters nobody revisited, the customization that exists to avoid a configuration fix, the month-end step that only worked because of a spreadsheet. When that happens we'll tell you, and you can decide whether to fix it now or note it. The same work instructions feed the business process review and the migration readiness work, so nothing you pay for here is wasted later.
The topic, who's learning it, when they start, and what the person before them used to do that nobody else can. You'll get a fixed-price proposal for the series, with recordings, work instructions and reference materials included.
You'll get a straight answer and a tight scope. If we can't help, we'll tell you that too — and usually who can.
