Most people would agree that custom eLearning can provide a successful vehicle for training most of your supply chain. It is only recently, however, that many of our clients have embraced custom eLearning for their warehouse staff.  And, it has proved to be highly successful! Historically, online training for warehouse staff has been considered too intrusive to the daily routine of the staff members or computer access has been inconvenient. At KMi, we have seen a reversal on this perspective as companies realize making computers accessible and providing online training time for employees has resulted in better trained and better functioning staff.

Developing customized eLearning content for your warehouse teams results in:

• Just-in-time and on-demand training access. This allows your staff to participate in training exactly when it relates to their job need resulting in a higher level of learning as they apply the knowledge more immediately.
• Custom eLearning can be developed and deployed quickly as learning gaps are identified or new skills are required. This means that your training program is dynamic and speaks to the real needs of a work environment. It eliminates the training delay common with most other learning programs.
• Customized content speaks to their actual job function.  When you provide custom eLearning content curricula, you are presenting the content that relates to the staffs’ actual jobs, functions, and skills. There is no extraneous content to cloud and confuse the learning. It saves time and makes the learning more valuable to both the employee and the company.
• Increases skill level of the warehouse staff and improves productivity of the warehouse. As your staff understands that the training is truly valuable to their job success, they embrace the opportunity to participate. And, because the training is available continuously, it can serve as a refresher and knowledge bank, adding ongoing value.

In addition, the training can be tracked and reports generated through our SCORM conformant LMS, eLMS. This can assist you in understanding where your learning gaps are, how your learning programs effect your warehouse function and provide other metrics for evaluating your learning curriculum.

If you would like to learn more about how KMI can help develop your warehouse staff, please contact Margie Herron  at mherron@kmionline.com .

Last week we discussed some of the reasons that a robust custom online training curriculum can enhance the success of your supply chain. This week we will look at a specific business case study to understand the challenges that such a program needs to address.

Client: One of America’s largest manufacturers and distributors of health care supplies and services

Company Profile: This company ships more than 100,000 products to health care facilities around the world. With nearly 7,000 employees spread over dozens of locations, they have a long-standing investment in employee training. One of their core values is to “create an atmosphere of growth and opportunity where all employees can reach their potential,” and they have sought innovative solutions to ensure their workforce skills are constantly improving. With employee training, they have a strong need to obtain the best results in the most cost effective way. 

Company Challenges:

• Keep workers safe. The most valuable outcome of effective training is to prevent injuries in the workplace. The question for this company is: how can training be improved to reduce risk?
• Train with greater efficiency. In lean economic times, there is pressure to reduce HR and training resources. Investment in training has to have the greatest possible result for dollar spent.
• Boost training effectiveness. Offline training puts a room of learners in front of one instructor. This training is difficult to offer to everybody, especially for firms with dispersed facilities and 24/7 operation. By its nature, face-to-face training makes it difficult to ensure every worker has the proper job skills and knowledge.
• Track and document training. Training across many facilities creates a formidable bookkeeping problem. Records have to track the initial and ongoing training of every employee. And good training records are mandatory for those daunting realities of business life: regulatory compliance and liability claims.

Sound familiar? At KMi we have discovered that most of our clients who have large, complex supply chains and warehousing and distribution facilities to support their business, encounter these same challenges. Next week, we will share the solution that KMi developed to successfully overcome each of the challenges using our outstanding custom (client-specific) content development team with our robust SCORM conformant LMS platform, eLMS.  If you are facing these challenges and would like to learn more about the KMi solution, please contact Margie Herron at mherron@kmionline.com.

Why should better training practices, including eLearning, be important to your company?  To be part of the leaner and more efficient supply chain of the future, companies must transform their investment in worker training – new technologies create new opportunities. Over the next few blogs, we will discuss just how  using innovative, client-specific eLearning can impact training and business outcomes.

Training and compliance within the supply chain has in the past been hampered by several formidable obstacles to efficiency. Here are some of the obstacles that must be overcome:

• New hires should learn all of the company policies, procedures, and best practices before they ever set foot into the facility. And they will be proficient in their jobs in nearly half the time it would take an experienced person to train them.

• Uneven training has to stop: all should receive the same training, free of biases or ambiguity, regardless of their supervisor’s interpretation of the content.

• The best employees must not be pulled from productive work to explain the basics to new hires.

A robust online training curriculum supported by a SCORM compliant LMS ( such as KMi's eLMS) creates an environment that addresses each of these concerns.

The Deep Filing Cabinet
Nobody will miss the filing cabinet when it’s gone. When reports are needed on training, or when compliance and liability information must be produced, a company cannot continue to have an army of filing cabinet experts poring over stacks of folders. It’s inefficient, time-consuming, and error-prone. With training managed online, a few mouse clicks will generate up-to-date training histories, test results and compliance reports. And, unlike a filing cabinet, this solution scales upward to bigger companies, more complex supply chains, and more difficult tasks.

• A well-designed online training solution can be the key factor in meeting these goals: initial training can be done before a new hire begins work, the same training and practices will be shared by all, and new hires can be brought into operations without interrupting work or dragging the more productive people down.

In summary, training in the supply chain of the future should come at a lower cost than before, and should be far more effective at creating a consistently well-prepared workforce.

With an online training solution, developed with your own subject matter experts, with your own specific content, geared to your variety of audiences, you will achieve your learning goals while reducing training costs, increasing productivity, lowering risk and growing internal compliance and  job skills.

In future blogs, we will share exactly the impact this approach has had on one of our medical products manufactuirng and distribution clients. The overwhlelming and quantifiable success of their Supply Chain curriculum has been felt from the warehouse, through order fulfillment, to customer service, all the way to the customer. 

Meanwhile if you would like more information on how KMi can help you achieve the same success with your supply chain, distributuion and warehouse enterprises, please contact Margie Herron at mherron@kmionline.com.

• eLearning is usually less expensive to produce: of course, this may be dependent on the production value and tools you use and the particular content, but, once developed, an eLearning course can be leveraged for years without additional costs.
• The user determines the pace: As a self-paced learner from way back, this is one of its most attractive benefits for me. I can move through any online training solution at my own pace and access it just when I need it. Cool! 
• The learner can move through the learning faster -- As a user, I can bypass information I already know and focus on the information that I need to know. Beats sitting in a classroom and listening to repetitive material every time!
• eLearning provides a consistent message : Many of our clients are global organizations. They need their messaging to be the same whether it is delivered in Singapore, Paris or San Francisco. And, they need it to reflect just that global diversity as well. We just produced an online customer service course. One of the key learning objectives was to establish a consistent and repeatable process for customer support across their global platform. Providing the training as web based eLearning was exactly the right format for this project.
• Implementing eLearning can provide training from any location, any time, and just in time: One of the most obvious applications of this benefit was a sales training series we did for a health system hardware provider. They recognized that their sales people had little advance time to prepare for sales calls because they had such a broad range of services and products. So we created a custom series that reps could access just prior to their sales meetings to educate and update them on products and services. It was a resounding success. 
• eLearning can be updated easily and quickly: I recall developing a series of product training courses, which were updated monthly. The course were template based and allowed for easy updating of product spec changes. This meant that the field always had the most current product information. Imagine doing that through classroom training!
• eLearning leads to increased retention and a stronger grasp on the subject: This is because of the many elements that can be combined in custom eLearning to reinforce the message, such as video, audio, quizzes, interaction, animations, virtual role plays, scenario-based decision-making. Users can also revisit material as they need. Online soft skills training is usually a content area that seems challenging, however, we have produced many highly effective manager skills training courses such as Coaching in this format. Taking advantage of the tools available can produce outstanding learning! 
• eLearning can be managed and delivered for large or small groups of students: Using a SCORM Learning Management System such as KMi's, eLMS, allows the administrators to market courses, provide pre-assessments, evaluations, surveys, reporting, success tracking, blogs and all kinds of other features to enhance the learning experience.