As the global economy rapidly changes, Australia’s manufacturing industry is evolving to remain competitive. The manufacturing sector in Australia contributes $100 billion in gross value to the national economy. Manufacturing organisations must, therefore, be innovative, adaptive and flexible, as a key part of this thriving economy.

Sounding like an important industry for Australia’s future? That’s because it is.

Faced with these statistics, the Winson Group Learning and Development (L&D) Team was keen to strengthen its capability and learning solutions to support the business.

Before we proceed, a bit of background on Winson Group

A proudly Australian owned business since 1968, Winson Group has been delivering trusted products and services across the country for more than 50 years. During this time, they have achieved consistent commercial growth by helping Australian businesses compete. An established Australian success story, the Winson Group thrives on close, trusted partnerships with their team members and customers. So, comprehensive, up-to-date and just-in-time training is crucial to maintaining these trusted relationships.

As a leading manufacturer and distributor of packing materials, safety supplies, industrial marking products, and labelling and coding solutions, comprehensive compliance training is also a key element of the Winson Group’s training requirements, along with industry and service training.

Training to protect the diversity of learners
Winson Group needed to determine how they could roll out comprehensive, consistent, on-demand learning and training solutions across six different locations. How could they ensure they were delivering the right training to workers in different teams, at different levels, requiring both company-wide training and training specific to roles?

Winson Group’s L&D team also wanted to reduce learner fatigue resulting from drawn-out assessment requirements, as well as see an increase in completion rates. This was challenging with employees in warehousing, manufacturing, and in offices across Australia. Additionally, Winson Group has a diverse employee base consisting of operational, professional, and technical roles.

Recognizing the critical nature of training
Given that compliance, service, and sales training is integral to their business, Winson Group reached out to Litmos for a solution.

In the twelve months since implementing Litmos LMS, the Winson Group has seen a 170 percent ROI – based on cost savings in process efficiency – and boosted their compliance completion rates to 80 percent.

They also won a global Service Training award by pairing their proprietary sales training program with the Litmos Training platform. This has enabled Winson Group to automate course assignments, ensuring their people receive and retain vital information within one digital environment.

Litmos assists Winson Group to deliver the highest standard of service training and development across their Australian operations. Winson Group can now comprehensively and consistently train service and support employees across the country, to skilfully represent their brand.

Mobile training was key to successful outcomes
With a significant portion of its workforce spending time in transit from site to site, the company needed a training solution with mobile capability, which could ensure time-critical training anywhere, anytime, on any device.

“Mobile capability and anywhere, anytime access has been a big win for us. Relating to our Service Program Award, we have been able to really enhance in-the-moment training support for our sales and technical service people.”
Nadia Golenkova, Learning & Organisational Development Manager, Winson Group

Mobile learning capability with Litmos has made rolling out consistent and just-in-time training across these geographically dispersed workers easy.

Overcoming corporate training obstacles
Litmos has also helped Winson Group improve the onboarding experience for their employees. With the Litmos Training platform, the Winson Group L&D Team has reduced onboarding time from six to three weeks – without any reduction in quality. This automated process has really taken the pressure off the team, with the added ability to draw on two off-the-shelf content libraries in addition to their own proprietary training.

Consequently, the Winson Group’s training is now turbocharged. Built-in gamification and interactive components in the Litmos LMS have gone a long way toward reducing learner fatigue and increasing engagement.

“Since launching Litmos, we’ve seen a sharp increase in several key eLearning benchmarks that we track, in particular a 220% (yes, that’s 220%) increase in online learning uptake,” said Golenkova.

Addressing training challenges in the manufacturing industry
With Litmos Training Content, the Winson Group now has hundreds of legally-endorsed compliance courses at their fingertips, which they can pair with their L&D team’s own content. Access to this has enriched the Winson Group’s content offering when it comes to creating targeted learning for their people. They can respond in real time to legislative updates, revisions to policies and procedures, and rest easy knowing that workers across the business have received consistent training, regardless of their location or level of employment.

Previously, compliance completion rates at the Winson Group had taken up to nine months. Now, it just takes 3 months for the Winson Group to be at over 80% overall compliance.

Today, the Winson Group is fully aligned with workplace training trends and delivering outstanding learning outcomes across the company.

According to Golenkova,“Learning is becoming more integrated with work, more personal, and is continuing its shift toward life-long models. Litmos has really helped us accelerate our alignment to these trends and also to deliver learning outcomes that underpin our business’s commercial and strategic goals.”