Our Client
Our client is one of the largest retailers in the world; with over 260 million customers visiting more than 11,500 stores under 65 banners in 28 countries and e-commerce sites in 11 countries. The company employs over 2.2 million associates worldwide and 1.4 million in the U.S. alone. They are committed to creating opportunities and bringing value to customers and communities around the world.
Their Business Challenge
A workforce size of 2 million requires a lot of training compounded by the fact that the courses need to be deployed at 11000 separate units. In the past, several vendors have provided training solutions and, our client had to integrate several learning management systems (LMS) to meet the growing need for tracking and measuring learning initiatives. This global LMS has become one of the largest known instances of an LMS installation with more than 2000 active eLearning modules used regularly and a number of course initiations and completions crossing over 250,000 for each case per day. Our client was grappling with deficient technological infrastructure and issues associated with managing content on such a huge LMS. Limited Internet bandwidth in some sites caused an increase in load time, and many concurrent users made the system slow. In many instances, source files were not available to make any changes in the content, sometime while the problem in the course was evident, issues in the code was untraceable. A number of bugs made some of the learning modules glitch-ridden and all of them needed quality checks and re-corrections along with software updates.
Our Solution
We identified and classified the issues into three areas –
A. Identify and rectify LMS limitations or constraints,
B. Repackage content and remove technical issues
C. Address IT infrastructure issues
The solution was deployed in three phases that was aimed at resolving all issues in 400 top consumed courses and bring down instances of modules that were not working, in the first phase. The second phase involved supporting the backend that enabled the learning momentum. In this phase, we built a dossier of technical specifications that was used as a guide for eLearning developers and supported the development team by providing technical guidance. In the third phase, we have streamlined the entire technology backbone that supports the learning initiatives. We modified technical specifications with changing infrastructure, defined a process to solve technical issues and developed templates that work with least file sizes, and those that work in the defined architecture.
As a part of providing technology support, we proactively perform pre-Quality assurance checks to identify errors that may not have been detected by the client yet and classify errors/bugs by risk and impact to help prioritize error handling.
Results
We helped our client by strengthening the learning technology backbone of the organization. Our attempt to provide a single window to resolve technical and LMS compatibility issues keeping in mind LMS and IT infrastructure challenges ensured reduction of problems in the global LMS by 40%. Our ability to decrease downtime has led to higher utilization of core support resources. We have saved ½ hour labor costs across 100,000 users in correcting courses, amounting to an approximate saving of $600,000 per year. Our solutions have also helped co-brand and repackage modules to create single SCORM packages across languages that have assisted in bringing down time of development of courses significantly.
Today our client has increased the technical architecture advancements by 50% clocking more than 300,000-course completions per month. By improving the availability and accessibility of learning, we were able to improve the impact of employee development for our client and became the Technical Support Partner globally.
