Dixons makes the right connections

Citation

(2009), "Dixons makes the right connections", Industrial and Commercial Training, Vol. 41 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/ict.2009.03741eab.002

Dixons makes the right connections

Article Type: Notes and news From: Industrial and Commercial Training, Volume 41, Issue 5

Dixons Store Group International (DSGi), a European specialist electrical and computing retailer, has saved an estimated £500,000 in training and administration costs after implementing a new learning-management system.

The company employs more than 40,000 staff across 1,300 stores in 28 countries. Its retail and e-tail brands include PC World, Currys and Dixons.co.uk in the UK and Ireland, Elkjøp in the Nordic countries, UniEuro in Italy, Kotsovolos in Greece, Electro World in central Europe, Greece and Turkey, PC City in Spain, Italy and Sweden, and Pixmania.com across Europe.

DSGi used to assess its sales staff one-to-one over the telephone, to ensure that they were complying with the latest UK Financial Services Authority requirements. Now it uses computer software capable of meeting compliance requirements with e-signatures, detailed reports and auditability. The system, supplied by Cobent, has been integrated with Microsoft’s Active Directory, to enable single sign-on, and Oracle’s Peoplesoft HR System.

Since moving to a centralized electronic training process, DSGi is able to manage both online and classroom-based training centrally, allowing the company to train, manage and report on its 20,000 current users with only four part-time system administrators.

Training has expanded from financial-product training into other commercial areas such as sales, support and product training. DSGi will also launch a new health and safety course across the organization, which is expected to reduce accidents by 40 percent.

BlueArc Corporation, a unified network storage company, has also implemented a learning-management system to streamline its company-wide training and development and help to sustain its growth by improving the effectiveness of its sales force.

BlueArc is using the LearnCenter platform, from Learn.com, to augment its live instructor-led training with self-pace Web-based training, thus expanding available courses for its worldwide sales and services teams.

“BlueArc is growing quickly. In-depth, in-person training simply could not scale”, said Jon Affeld, senior director of marketing. “We needed to make sure that the right people were getting the right information at the right time”.

In addition to providing round-the-clock access to training online, BlueArc is offering video instruction, internal talk shows and whiteboard “chalk talks”. The company also offers tailored content tied to job roles as well as a library of specialized content available to all employees.

“This information previously required more costly, time-consuming group events”, said Ken Rosen, owner of Theory and Practice Consulting, who has been supporting the project. “BlueArc should realize significant savings by switching to self-pace, on-demand training rather than predominantly face-to-face instruction, which has many hard and soft dollar costs. Additionally, the company will gain consistency of training and messaging with reduced time-to-productivity”.

BlueArc provides high-performance unified network storage systems to enterprise markets, as well as data-intensive markets such as the entertainment industry, the US Federal government, higher education, internet-service companies, the oil and gas industry and life sciences. BlueArc enables organizations to expand the ways they explore, research, create, process and innovate in data-intensive environments.

Xanodyne Pharmaceuticals is a third business recently to implement learning-management software. The integrated pharmaceutical company, with headquarters in Newport, Kentucky, is using LearnCenter to increase the efficiency and cut the costs of training its medical sales specialists across the USA.

Xanodyne, which markets prescription pharmaceuticals and prenatal vitamins, will create a Web-based portal where sales employees will have round-the-clock access to annual training courses, company communications and new product launches on-demand.

Kari Swanson-England, director of training and development, commented: “The software will provide a standardized and centralized repository where we can push out learning and training tools and house our documents. The ability it gives us consistently to deliver training on our products on-demand significantly increases our return on investment because of having a more highly trained and skilled sales force”.

“It will also help to get our products to market sooner. If we can get our sales people knowledgeable faster, they can add more sales volume in the calendar year and that means top-line and bottom-line growth for Xanodyne, not to mention happier customers”.

“As we continue to add more sales specialists around the country, the software will provide a systematic on-boarding process which will accelerate the time to sales-specialist productivity”, concluded Jessica Erker, manager of training and development at Xanodyne.