City of Bakersfield Takes a User-First Approach to Back-Office Modernization With Whatfix

The City of Bakersfield Story

City of Bakersfield Leaps into Smarter City Operations by Modernizing Its ERP System

The City of Bakersfield, located in California’s Central Valley, is home to over 400,000 residents and supports a thriving economy that spans agriculture, oil, and tourism. To serve its growing population more effectively, the city embarked on a digital transformation journey, modernizing its back-end legacy systems with Oracle ERP to streamline procurement and business workflows and Oracle HCM for its HR service delivery and people management.

As part of this initiative, Bakersfield partnered with TAM Training, which introduced the City to Whatfix to take a next-generation approach to facilitating frictionless change, providing hands-on onboarding and training, reducing support requests across city departments, and ultimately realizing its vision from its Oracle back-end modernization project.

“Digital transformation is important for a city like ours, where we were using an old system earlier,” said Rukaiya Noordeen, Enterprise Business Analyst who was responsible for driving change management efforts for the City’s ERP system. “Now that we’ve moved to Oracle ERP, while change is not always easy, we’re growing, learning, and becoming more flexible with new methods and procedures.”

The Challenge

Traditional Training Resulted in Unprepared Users and High Support Costs

The City of Bakersfield’s ERP user training process was slow, manual, and heavily reliant on internal enablement and support teams. New and existing employees struggled with Oracle ERP’s complex interface, especially when it came to submitting invoices, creating requisitions, and issuing POs.

Key challenges included:

• High volume of support requests from city employees on Oracle’s workflows, especially for new employees who felt underprepared after their onboarding.
• Static training materials (like PDFs and email walkthroughs) quickly became outdated and left users unprepared for real-world activities.
• Frequent invoice rejections from incorrect data entry, resulting in rework and dirty data.
• A lack of workflow governance resulted in prolonged turnaround times and slow task completion.
• Low user confidence and inconsistent data entry across teams led to rework activities and hindered the ability to derive insights from the data.

The Solution

Enabling City Workers in the Flow of Work With Intuitive, Guided Oracle Workflows

To address these challenges, the City of Bakersfield utilized Whatfix to target specific pain points that were slowing its Oracle adoption journey. Its goal was to create an in-app onboarding and self-help experience that empowered city workers to complete tasks accurately and independently.

With Whatfix, the City enabled its workforce and accelerated Oracle ERP and HCM workflows with:

• Flows for guiding users through tasks like creating/canceling purchase requests, issuing POs, and submitting expense reports.
• Self Help acted as a central knowledge hub, with AI conversational search and multilingual support via auto-translate for Spanish-speaking staff.
• Beacons that were placed strategically over fields and input buttons to proactively guide users, reduce input errors, and validate data entry.
• Task Lists that streamline system onboarding for new hires with guided, hands-on user training.

“If transactions were submitted incorrectly, it delayed payments and created unnecessary confusion for users and our support team,” said Noordeen. “Whatfix helped reduce that frustration by guiding users to complete tasks the right way—and that’s why our team values it as part of our change management and training strategy.”

Noordeen highlighted the impact that Beacons have had on its invoice submission process. Before Whatfix, users struggled to log invoices properly and often filled out digital forms incorrectly, resulting in 100+ rejected invoices per month. With Whatfix’s Beacons, the City immediately eliminated over half of its rejected invoices.

“One of the simplest features, like a beacon or an information tip, has completely changed how our users experience the system,” Noordeen shared. “Instead of seeing a screen full of confusing fields, they now feel guided. It’s no longer overwhelming—they know where to look, and that small shift makes a huge difference in adoption and user confidence.”

The Results

50% Fewer Invoice Rejections, 130+ Confident Users, and Value Realization of Its Oracle Investments

The impact of Whatfix at the City of Bakersfield was immediate and measurable, resulting in accelerated employee training, more confident users, and frictionless ERP workflows, with a direct impact on the City’s financial and administrative outcomes.

This included:

• Rejected invoices dropped by over 50%, from 100+ per month to under 50, after Whatfix Beacons guided users to correct fields.
• 73% overall adoption of Whatfix, with 130 out of 170 activated users actively engaging with content.
• Support reduction during the onboarding phase through in-app Flows and Self Help.
• Improved user experience, especially for those new to Oracle ERP and procurement systems.

“As someone new to project coordination, training, and change management, I learned a lot through Whatfix,” Noordeen said. “Not just about the platform, but also about new training methods, anticipating user needs, and improving how we support others.”