Elearning! Magazine: Building Smarter Companies via Learning & Workplace Technologies.
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machinists into highly-trained experts. With more than 40,000 machines functioning in the Americas and multiple people requiring training on each one of those, MSU offers numerous course options in nine lan- guages. Mori Seiki USA also has 295 employees and nearly 600 distributor employees in need of training. At the end of FY2008, MSU had delivered nearly 19,000 man-hours of instruction through 4,700 course completions. In FY2009, that number jumped to more than 30,000 man-hours and 9,000 course completions. Jones expects that number to climb even higher now that the DMG/Mori Seiki collaboration in the USA is complete. According to Jones, the GeoMaestro LMS not only provides Mori Seiki with the opportunity to train employ- ees, distributors and customers on their machines, as well as manufacturing skills, it has also been a tremendous differ- entiator in the company's sales training, safety awareness and Challenge Creating a learning man- agement system that could keep learners up with rap- idly-changing CNC machine tool technology. Solution Deciding on a three- pronged approach to learning that includes online, on-site and class- room training with the goal of transforming regular machinists into highly- trained experts. documentation through the LMS. It's paying off." Each employee at Mori Seiki has an assigned learning plan, including 45 hours of online training each year. Time is split equally among HR train- ing, a manager-selected plan and elective courses of the employee's own choosing from the catalog of nearly 500 in the system. Jones says this gives the employees more focus and has been a significant differ- ence in productivity. SPEED TO COMPETENCY Mori Seiki's customers also ben- efit greatly from the easy-to- access information via MSU, Jones says. Once an order is placed, customers can immedi- ately begin online training pro- grams before the machine arrives. Then, when the machine is delivered, an engineer arrives and conducts hands-on training as well. Customers can also come to the classroom for more instruction on machine models. Rapid deployment of information is beneficial when a company is stuck in a hard situation. "We had a customer who found themselves unexpectedly without their machine operator. They were left hanging in the balance with contracts to fulfill and didn't have time for an engineer to come out and train Time is split equally among HR training, a manager-selected plan and elective courses of the employee's own choosing from the catalog of nearly 500 in the system. HR compliance. "We went back and took a look at our safety procedures and started requiring that our employees train on safety issues once a month through the LMS," says Jones. "Since then, the num- ber of safety incidents we've had has plummeted. We really believe that we have built a safety aware- ness here that has never existed before. Now, we drive all of our safety procedures and training them. The owner and supervi- sor both had some, but limited, knowledge of the equipment and were able to start training immediately online and in sev- eral hours were back to making parts," says Jones. THE FUTURE OF MSU With employees and distribu- tors being the primary users of the LMS now, Jones says Mori Seiki plans on using GeoLearning's extended enter- prise solutions to reach external audiences. With the ability to create an open site Web portal as a public entrance into the LMS without a login, customers can access MSU's course catalog and purchase at the site as they subscribe for a course, thus reducing the company's cost. "We plan to bring customers to our LMS in a big way. We want to create a domain for customers using e-commerce and develop a new revenue stream from that. We intend to have customers from around the globe come in and pay at the site as they subscribe for a course, helping us reduce cost and giving them instant access to information," says Jones. "The tools that this LMS provides us with have allowed us to put together a winning combination and blow the socks off our competition," Jones adds. "The speed at which we are learning has given us a competitive advan- tage; making us smarter, better and faster than everyone else and putting us way ahead of the pack in the manufacturing equipment market." —For more information about using learning and knowledge management for employee development and to positively impact external audiences, visit www.geolearning.com. Annual 2010 33 Government Elearning!