Why your staff are working around the new system
It is almost never resistance to change. It is usually that the system costs them more time than it saves them, and they are right.
A retail group we later worked with spent well into six figures on a system its staff would not use. Management put it down to resistance to change and ran more training.
What was actually happening
Recording a sale in the new system took eleven taps. The old one took four. Over a shift, that difference was around forty minutes of standing still in front of customers.
The staff were not resisting change. They had performed an accurate cost-benefit analysis and acted on it. The training was addressing the wrong problem entirely.
The diagnostic
When a system is being worked around, ask one question: what does this cost the person using it, in seconds, for their most frequent action?
Not the impressive action from the demo. The boring one they do four hundred times a day. If that number went up, adoption will fail no matter how good the reporting is.
Why it happens so reliably
Because the person who chooses business software is usually not the person who uses it. The buyer evaluates capability — can it do X? The user experiences friction — how long does X take? Capability wins procurement processes; friction determines whether anything actually gets entered.
What to do about it
Before signing anything, have the people who will use it every day perform their five most frequent tasks in the demo environment. Time them. Compare honestly against what they do now.
If the new system is slower on the common path, it does not matter what else it does. It will be worked around, and the reports built on top of it will be wrong.
Working on something like this?
We are usually happy to talk it through, even if you do not hire us.