Multinational Manufacturer Saves Hundreds of Hours Using the Thought Industries Platform

This international manufacturer switched from their homegrown LMS to Thought Industries to automate processes, save time, and improve the learning experience for thousands of customers.

This manufacturer develops automated tests and measurement systems that help engineers solve the world’s most complex challenges. This includes everything from new cell phone design, to rocket launches, and electric vehicle testing. They have around 7,000 employees globally, with the manufacturing team spread around the world.

Their original homegrown learning platform was designed primarily for an academic audience, including professors and students using their products in classrooms, but this wasn’t a good fit for their professional audience. They didn’t have the features they needed, such as learning paths, notifications, a learning catalog, and the ability to integrate their virtual training.

With such complex training needs, they needed a way to increase the breadth of learning functionality provided to their learners. This would not be possible with their original homegrown solution. In early 2020, they chose to work with Thought Industries.

The Thought Industries customer learning platform had all the functionality needed to create a modern, user-friendly customer education program. This included automating course registration and certificate creation processes, updating the look and feel in line with a corporate rebrand, and making all learning available on one platform, rather than requiring people to visit three separate sites to register for a course.

They also made use of the native authoring functionality in the Thought Industries platform, enabling them to create more engaging, interactive courses, combining videos, quizzes, activities and more to keep learners interested.

Some of the key results from the work with Thought Industries include:

• Up to 8,000 active users a month
• Productivity gains based on 280 hours returned to administrators
• Automation gains are expected to return an additional 300 hours to administrators over the next 18 months
• 100 virtual instructor-led training courses delivered monthly

The Challenge

As this manufacturing organization grew in size and scope, it had outgrown its original homegrown learning management system (LMS), which could no longer be adapted to the changing needs of the global organization. Customer learning was always running behind products and software, and learning was not a priority within the organization. It would have been impossible to add the features and functionality needed within the requested timeframe and budget using the existing systems, so it was time to look for a new learning platform. It was an opportunity to bring together the learning team, which was previously spread across the organization, into a single customer education function, which would become a revenue center rather than a cost center.