Wayne Manuel is the Vice President of Operations at Avista. His role has evolved significantly since he first joined the company as Chief Information Officer, a position in which he completed a full strategic plan within his first months. Over time he transitioned into a broader operations and technology role, and today he serves as the executive sponsor of the ERP implementation, signing contracts and meeting regularly with implementation leadership to keep the program on track.
Wayne and I sat down to talk about the origins, challenges, and philosophy behind Avista's ERP initiative. My questions focused on understanding how a project of this scale gets off the ground, what resistance looks like from a leadership perspective, and how the organization plans to bring its workforce along through the change.
During our conversation Wayne walked me through how the ERP vision first took shape. After joining Avista as CIO, he convened a group of officers to take stock of the company's systems and identify where the most pressing challenges were. What emerged from that assessment was a clear picture of aging infrastructure. Many core systems were approaching end-of-life, and rather than addressing each one individually, Wayne saw an opportunity to consolidate those efforts into a single ERP and customer information platform that would deliver greater long-term value. That idea, which he originated, set the entire initiative in motion. From there, Avista brought in an external firm to define scope, cost, and benefits, followed by a formal RFP process that ultimately resulted in the unanimous selection of SAP and Delaware as the implementation partner.
Wayne brought to this work a career's worth of experience across energy, healthcare, banking, and other industries, having been part of hundreds of large-scale system implementations. That background shaped his approach in concrete ways. He spoke about the importance of speed, standardization, and minimizing customization, lessons he has carried from one implementation to the next. He was direct about what he has seen go wrong when organizations try to bend a system to their existing habits rather than using the implementation as a moment to rethink how they operate.
One of the clearest pain points he described was application sprawl. Field employees were juggling as many as eight separate applications with no single sign-on, in some cases writing down usernames and passwords just to get through their day. These systems did not communicate with each other, creating gaps in the customer experience and adding unnecessary friction to everyday work. For Wayne, simplifying that environment was not just a technical goal but a prerequisite for getting people to actually embrace the change. He was clear that the more intuitive and frictionless a system is, the less resistance it generates. Consolidating applications, enabling mobile access, and building in single sign-on were all part of making the transition feel like an improvement rather than an imposition.
He also spoke about network infrastructure as foundational to any of this working. When he arrived at Avista, connectivity at operational sites was unreliable enough that even a well-designed digital workflow would have felt slow and frustrating. He made the decision to invest in fixing that infrastructure regardless of whether an ERP was coming, because better connectivity was necessary for any digital future the company might pursue. That gradual, quiet groundwork helped lay the conditions for the ERP to succeed.
He described change management as a science-based discipline, one that involves stakeholder analysis, deliberate communication campaigns, and consistent repeated messaging to build awareness and readiness over time. He acknowledged that resistance is expected and spoke about strategies for listening to concerns, demonstrating benefits, and at minimum achieving compliance when full buy-in is not immediately possible. He was also careful to address one of the most common fears surrounding large technology implementations, which is job security. Wayne stated that Avista's approach to efficiency gains is managed through attrition and reskilling rather than workforce reductions, and that modernization creates new opportunities in areas like IT and security rather than eliminating roles.
He also talked about the early days of introducing the ERP vision, when he encountered real skepticism from people who had been burned by a previous implementations that went wrong. Rather than pushing past that resistance, he took a collaborative approach, involving those voices in the scoping and selection process. Many of those early skeptics have since joined the program as active participants, a outcome he described with clear satisfaction. For Wayne, that shift is proof that the right idea, presented at the right time and in the right way, can bring even the most reluctant people on board.
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