Ensuring high quality across global operations
The Hansgrohe Group is a major player in the bathrooms, kitchens, and wellness industries, generating €1.4 billion in sales annually. The company lives and breathes premium quality and design. It needed a best-in-breed learning platform to ensure the highest quality delivery across all its global operations with over 5,400 employees in 34 companies and 20 sales offices.
How to achieve a consistent delivery worldwide
The Hansgrohe Group is committed to top quality. Delivering on this commitment entails communicating the quality message to all employees at multiple locations around the globe. To that end, the company needed to guarantee the same high level of expertise in all its divisions, whether in the USA, Europe, or China.
Face-to-face professional development was another challenge: shift workers in production had few options for attending courses held at remote locations during their normal working hours.
A top-tier distributed learning system
In 2006, Dynamic Media GmbH (later merged with imc) developed an LMS for Hansgrohe. Since that time, all employees have been able to learn independently, free of time constraints. They have access to industrial safety courses, fleet training programmes, and diverse learning offerings for topics in IT security, quality management, and staff development. More recently, the company introduced its employee app, giving its production workers easy access to the learning platform and relevant training content.
But that’s not all. In 2021, Hansgrohe adopted the imc LMS. This opened up a whole new category of learning to its installers, resellers, designers, and others. These users can now access a wealth of e-learning content and information on the company’s entire hansgrohe range and its AXOR luxury range.
Each division of the Hansgrohe Group is able to design its own training content. The company uses imc’s content authoring tools – Content Studio and imc Express – to create engaging e-learning content. Hansgrohe chose Content Studio because of its impressive user-friendliness and wide range of options for interactions.
Thanks to imc Express, the company can now automatically translate user-generated content and integrate it directly into the LMS. This is possible because imc Express is browser-based. The system also includes approval workflows to ensure that only approved high-quality content gets shown to learners.
Flexible corporate training a big hit with employees
During the pandemic, Hansgrohe hit on the smart idea of using their imc LMS as a vaccination booking tool. The platform gave employees and their families an easy and convenient way of booking appointments, enabling them to take advantage of the company’s in-house vaccination offer.
The project manager in charge, Jasmin Gargano, is pleased with how the system worked.
“Our main criterion was to give our employees a fast, bureaucracy-free booking system so they could protect themselves and their families. And the imc Learning Suite seemed the perfect choice for the necessary central administration capability. Our employees were already familiar with the system, so they found the booking process very easy. The resulting personal data was deleted from the system afterwards. Needless to say, the offering was very well received by our workforce.”
At Hansgrohe, learning ties in with the company’s core value of mutual appreciation and respect. A key tenet of the corporate culture is for all employees to be empowered to learn independently. Thanks to the adoption of the imc Learning Suite and imc authoring tools, this is now a reality at all the corporate locations.
The company also continually expands its learning paths and optimises internal processes with regard to skill and competency level. Hansgrohe plans to focus ever more closely on the needs of its employees to provide them with even better training.
Training internal and external audiences
Headquartered in Hamburg-Eppendorf, Eppendorf AG develops, produces and distributes products and services for laboratories all over the world. These products are often used in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and food sectors.
The company is the world market leader in many areas of laboratory technology. Across its global operations, the group has more than 3,000 employees at 34 locations.
Knowledge acquisition in record time
Increasing legal requirements, fast global growth, more employees, a more extensive portfolio and a shorter time to market – A few years ago, Eppendorf AG faced all of these challenges. To fight these challenges, it required not only the employees to be trained but also the network of external partners and service providers to be educated. Only when this network of both internal and external groups (together the so-called "Extended Enterprise") is up to date with the latest products, services and developments, at all times, Eppendorf can provide the quality that it strives for. Time and efficiency are essential in this training process.
Mastering these challenges is even harder when old-fashioned and time-consuming training processes slow down the progress. This is where the professionally set-up blended learning concept within a cloud-based solution comes to the rescue.
An open professional development concept
As part of an integrated e-learning strategy, the imc Learning Suite was implemented across the entire company as “Eppendorf Academy”. Hosting in the Microsoft Azure Cloud ensures virtually unlimited scalability and immediate availability
The objective was to systematically complement or replace existing face-to-face training courses with e-learning offers to create a blended learning experience.
The imc authoring tool Content Studio was chosen for the creation of interactive and multimedia learning content.
90 % of users rate the courses
as helpful
In order to facilitate swift identification and rectification of gaps in the content, obtaining continuous feedback from the course participants was very important for Eppendorf AG.
The dialogue with the learners directly shows to what extent the learning content helped the learners perform their daily tasks, and where further improvements were needed.
The participants’ feedback has been impressive: A staggering 90% of users to date rate the courses as helpful or very helpful.
Learning management system helps
cut red tape
S&G was founded in 1898. In 1998, on its 100-year anniversary, it was renamed S&G Automobil AG.
The subsidiary S&G Automobilgesellschaft established in 1990 is now the biggest Mercedes-Benz representative in Saxony-Anhalt. Today, around 1,400 employees including almost 300 trainees and apprentices at 11 locations in Baden-Wuerttemberg and 8 sites in Saxony-Anhalt ensure that we keep our promise every single day:
“With S&G, you are in for a good drive.”
Meeting documentation obligations
with mobile learning
S&G wanted to bring the company’s professional development and training measures up to date and drive digitalisation. The objective was to quickly and directly provide information to around 1,300 employees across 19 locations. This required reductions in email traffic while ensuring that employees really do receive information on training courses. Furthermore, all employees regularly need to complete training courses on topics such as money laundering, compliance and data protection. This process was to be uniform and clear to map.
In addition, solutions were needed to equally train employees without permanent access to a desktop computer.
Uniform processes and time-savings
The solution came from imc, featuring a central platform and the learning management system – which S&G named “Lernwelt” – world of learning. Once implemented, the LMS ensured that employees actually receive information and are able to complete the right training courses.
The allocation of training courses and instructions is automated, and employees are assigned groups and receive course information and bookings automatically depending on the group they belong to. For instance, an automated reminder is sent out when its time for an employee to refresh their training on a particular topic.
“Lernwelt” brings greater acceptance
S&G was able to achieve some of its goals immediately after implementing the LMS: The paper and email overload decreased significantly. S&G intensively uses the automated allocation, and automatically assigns advanced training and instructions or sends out reminders for mandatory training to individual user groups. This also simplifies verification and documentation of mandatory training on topics such as money laundering, compliance, and data protection.
The fact that employees can now register for training courses directly rather than having to go through their line manager also helped to cut administration costs. Moreover, transitioning some of the face-to-face training to an online format resulted in major time savings.
The Content Studio also helped to improve course quality, and employees highly appreciate the training units designed by their own colleagues. This boosted acceptance of the LMS.
Find our more about S&G and further details about the LMS-implementation in the interview of the article series LMS Hot Topics.
