Catering to the Individual L&D Needs of a Global Outfit (Case Study)

A global outfit with offices spread across Europe, Asia, North America, Latin America and Pacific. 77 at that. And one key requirement - to make the training management simple, centralized and standardized for all countries with an ability to cater to the individual L&D needs of each country. No mean task, this. But something right up our alley at UpsideLMS. Thus began our long-serving relationship with a leading global provider of facility services, ISS. This was almost 5 years back.

Background

At the time of project initiation, ISS had no provision for centralized training for its geographically dispersed offices across the world. Administrative efforts for maintaining user training data, managing competencies and licenses, keeping track of licenses, managing classroom training were intense, leading to high administrative costs. ISS' key requirement was to make the training management simple, centralized and standardized for all countries with an ability to cater to the individual L&D needs of each country.

UpsideLMS: The perfect fit for ISS

Key features of the implementation included:

1. Personalized Learning Experience

UpsideLMS, in the form of 'My Learning - ISS', enabled ISS employees to access online courses, learning resources as well as extensive employee development programs tailored to the company's brand values, anytime. So employees did not only have access to eLearning quickly and easily, but they also had face-to-face training records and ISS certification for completed modules at their fingertips. ISS too could track and review the progress of its learners (i.e. employees).

2. Multi-portal Architecture

UpsideLMS' multi-portal architecture met ISS's primary requirement of a Learning Management System that could host multiple portals and yet be controlled centrally. This enabled ISS to create separate portals for each of its regional offices with individual access, dedicated URL and a personalized learning environment, while ISS' L&D team retained the control, rights and privileges for each portal.

To ISS's globally distributed workforce, UpsideLMS offered country specific standalone portals that were not only in line with their company branding, but were feature-rich and easy-to-use for its users. To ISS, it served as a centralized Learning Management Platform that enabled easy upload, delivery and management of online courses, monitoring of portals' usage of the system and overall training impact assessment.

3. Integration with existing systems

UpsideLMS allowed seamless integration with ISS’s country specific HR and Payroll enterprise applications for information sharing and managing various functions with ease. To automate the function of creating as well as updating learner profiles, and thereby reduce the (manual) administrative task for managing learners on the LMS, a scheduled update process was implemented to fetch the data from the client’s country-specific HRIS systems into UpsideLMS.

Through ADFS Integration, two important facilities i.e. AD SYNC and ADFS Authentication were enabled for a selected set of ISS learners. AD SYNC is used to Create/Update learner data in the LMS, while ADFS Authentication is used for authentication of the learners.

4. Multi-lingual Support

UpsideLMS’ multi-lingual support capability eliminated the language barrier for ISS’s worldwide employee base by offering country specific solution in languages like Turkish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish.

That's not all. It's for a reason that Dan Bennett, Group Learning & Development Manager at ISS, says "In addition to being excellent value for money, some of Upside’s key strengths are their flexibility and willingness to work with their clients to really understand their needs." Sure enough, while UpsideLMS is offered as an off-the-shelf, Could-based, SaaS LMS, some customizations were undertaken to make it more suitable for ISS' unique requirements. Some custom developments in UpsideLMS as 'My Learning - ISS' include a Competency Management module, Retraining module, Batch Management (as a part of ILT), Dashboards for Administrators, Learners and Line Managers and related Reports.

The detailed case study is available here.