Supporting organizations going through change
Impact at a Glance
Activating a change champion community, executing a tailored change management strategy, and driving effective change sponsor engagement helped guide Al-Pac to a successful SAP S/4HANA implementation — one piece of a ten-year, business-led transformation journey to support continued growth and solidify its position as the largest single-line pulp producer in North America. A central part of that journey was a multi-phased ERP program launched in 2019 — SAP S/4HANA, SuccessFactors, and Employee Central Payroll (ECP) — spanning ten business domains. But this was ground Al-Pac had never covered before: the organization had no formal training function, no established change management practice, and a workforce whose decades of hands-on operational expertise didn't automatically translate into confidence with a new system. Success meant building both a change and training capability from scratch — fast enough to support go-live, and durable enough to carry the rest of the transformation forward.
“Seeing the change ambassadors being proactive and engaging their teams in this way — and how confidently our people have taken to the new end-user training — is encouraging and quite frankly impressive—something I’ve not seen at Al-Pac before.
Many thanks to the Harbinger Team for getting us this far, please continue the amazing work!”
Michelle Sulz, Project Manager, Al-Pac
Who is Alberta Pacific Forest Industries Ltd?
Alberta Pacific Forest Industries Ltd. (Al-Pac) is the largest single-line kraft pulp producer in North America — an industry leader known for product quality, mill operations, and responsible forest management. Al-Pac places strong emphasis on workforce development and long-standing partnerships with local communities, with many team members bringing decades of tenure and deep operational expertise.
What was the challenge?
At its inception, Al-Pac possessed leading technology systems, operational machinery, and processes. To support continued growth and solidify its position as the largest single-line pulp producer in North America, Al-Pac embarked on a ten-year, business-led transformation journey. A major milestone was a multi-phased ERP program beginning in 2019 — SAP S/4HANA, SuccessFactors, and Employee Central Payroll (ECP) — designed to enable sustainability by adopting industry-leading, proven business processes.
The program centred on three focus areas:
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Modern Integrated Platform — replacing an aging portfolio of core business systems, simplifying processes, reducing customization, and building robust integrations, including LIMS, LRM, QMS, Forte, and Rader interfaces
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Improving the Speed of Business — automating manual processes, providing access to quality information for sound decision-making, and equipping teams to manage cost-intensive initiatives such as mill shutdowns
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Sustainability and Growth — responding quickly to new business requirements, adopting industry best practices, and uncovering new opportunities to innovate
The functional scope was substantial, touching ten business domains: finance and accounting, project accounting, purchasing, inventory management, enterprise asset management, production planning, quality management, sales and distribution, transportation management, and human resources and payroll.
Although Al-Pac had experienced change before, the scope and magnitude of this implementation were unprecedented — and from a learning and change perspective, the organization had no formal training function, limited learning infrastructure, and resource constraints across functional areas. Al-Pac engaged Harbinger to lead the Change Management (CM) and Learning program for the ERP implementation, with a mandate to empower formal and informal change leaders and support a long-tenured, change-experienced, and diverse workforce through the digital transformation.
What did we do?
Harbinger led both the Change Management and training workstreams for the program, with Change Management setting the strategy and structure that training was built to deliver against.
Stakeholder Engagement and Analysis
With COVID-19 restrictions in place, Harbinger launched the CM program with virtual stakeholder interviews across more than 40 employees to understand current ways of working, change appetite, awareness and buy-in, and support requirements for the digital transformation. Most stakeholders understood the need for change, but the impacts on their current ways of working, the time and leadership support required, and the cultural effect of the SAP S/4HANA implementation were unclear.
Change Champion Community
Based on these insights, Harbinger built a tiered Change Champion Community for Al-Pac — a Change Sponsor, Change Leaders, and Change Ambassadors representing every business unit — each with distinct responsibilities: the Change Sponsor as the visionary and visible spokesperson for the change; Change Leaders (the senior leadership team, managers, and business unit leaders) localizing the change vision for their teams; and Change Ambassadors as the go-to individuals gathering feedback and acting as boots on the ground during pandemic travel restrictions.
The engagement strategy behind the community included town halls featuring a Myth-Busters presentation supported by executive sponsors, Change Sponsor Listening Tours, the appointment of more than 30 Change Ambassadors selected for openness to change and working knowledge of legacy processes, Change Ambassador meeting toolkits, a Change Leader Strengths Capability Assessment used to build tailored action plans, and an MS Teams channel that centralized questions, answers, and CM resources in one place.
Change Readiness Assessments
Change Readiness Surveys were distributed to all internal SAP end-users on a bi-annual basis to assess where employees and the business sat on the change curve, and to engage and listen to stakeholders. The surveys achieved an average 36% participation rate — a strong response given a significant share of the workforce are non-desk employees — and provided baseline data on opportunity, risk, and resistance that fed directly into the project's go/no-go decision-making.
A Tailored Change Management Strategy
Harbinger tailored its CM approach around the areas of highest impact and resistance: Plant Maintenance and Human Resources. Plant Maintenance comprised the largest group of front-line employees, who relied on a highly customized visual system being replaced by SAP S/4HANA's out-of-the-box solution — a more complex process with a different look and feel. Meanwhile, SAP SuccessFactors and ECP shifted HR from completing tasks on employees' behalf to a self-service model that touched every employee in the organization.
To support both groups, CM Leads developed tailored plans focused on the people side of change — ensuring adequate change ambassador coverage across all shifts in Plant Maintenance, keeping leadership informed through regular touchpoints, and running tailored Roadshow events that previewed the new system and gave employees a chance to ask questions.
Supporting End-User Training
The Change Management strategy was delivered through a structured training program built specifically for Al-Pac's long-tenured, operations-driven workforce. Harbinger developed 50+ course books, 450 work instructions, and 150 QRGs, all hosted in Al-Pac's Learning Center, and used a blended delivery model — SAP Enable Now eLearning, side-by-side training led by Al-Pac Functional Leads, pre-recorded video tutorials, and approximately 90 Virtual Instructor-Led Training sessions over three months — to support more than 400 learners in a dedicated training environment ahead of go-live.
What was the outcome?
A Lasting Capability for Al-Pac's Next Decade of Transformation
Most importantly, Al-Pac was left with a repeatable, sustainable training and change capability that continues to support system adoption and future transformation initiatives — turning a one-time ERP rollout into a durable organizational asset.
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90% of employees agreed the changes resulting from the implementation were manageable, per the final Change Readiness survey
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85% agreed they would be able to perform their jobs as of go-live
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30+ Change Ambassadors identified and activated as informal change leaders, later transitioning to Key Users for hypercare — resolving almost 50% of incidents before they reached the Help Desk over eight weeks
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100% training completion achieved shortly after go-live
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Consistent attendance above 95% throughout the program
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Ongoing Hypercare support, including reinforcement training, end-user assistance, and additional QRG development for high-impact areas
Many of the Change Ambassadors exceeded expectations, and Al-Pac continues to draw on this group for ongoing transformation activities — a change capability, backed by a governed training model, that the organization can carry into whatever comes next.