Overcoming the challenges of producing training content

across multiplelocations

Chris Barras

Electrocomponents• The leading international high service distributor of

electronic, electrical and industrial supplies • Trading as RS in the UK, most of Europe and Asia,

Radiospares in France and Allied Electronics in North America

• 1.2m customers • 350,000 products • Around 5,200 employees • Operating in 26 countries, covering 82% of the world’s

GDP with distributors in many more • Revenue of £828.5m • Selling via catalogues, e-Commerce and trade counters • 25% of sales via e-Commerce • Websites in 17 languages covering 70 countries

• Providing a very wide range of products (over 300,000) so that customers can come to us for their small order needs;

• Exceptionally high levels of product availability - in the largest companies over 99% of individual products ordered are in stock;

• 24 hour, 365 day order-taking; • Courier service available for very urgent needs; • Account management services and purchasing cards available to

strengthen companies' purchasing controls; • Technical information and advice free to customers; • Internet trading available in every market; • e-Purchasing available across Europe - with the potential to cut

our customers' order costs by £50 - £100 per order.

Electrocomponents

Strategic Investment in Training(5 years ago and continuing!)

• SAP Project team insisted on a tool due to the project size and geography

• 10 Countries

• 2500 people

• 30 locations

• 7+ SAP modules (replacing legacy systems)

• 500 transactions

• Today the organisational commitment to training continues

SAP modules: Being deployed

Major Market and locations

RS UK

1 Call Centre

15 Trade Counters

4 Call & Collect Counters

2 Warehouse locations (DCs)

Radiospares France1 Warehouse / Call Centre

RS Germany1 Warehouse2. Call Centre

Why RS chose STT• Rapid training material development

• Materials had to be easy to edit

• Tool needed to be simple to use

• 3 training and documentation products were evaluated

• STT:

• On-Demand

• InfoPak

• A tools re-evaluation took place in 2004

• STT now used to produce simulations and documentation

Gaining User Acceptance• STT used as pre-training before classroom training

• Always introduced by a team leader to ensure objectives and benefits of using STT are clear to users

• STT used in 2 key areas

• Key transactions with many users

• Remote user training

• STT written as e-Learning

Lessons available 24/7

• A light LMS is used as a role-based learning portal

• Each country can edit their own lessons but they are saved back to a UK server

• Statistics are retrieved from STT lessons to monitor general trends in regions or job roles

Learn EBS: Project Title

Everyone Can access from Intranet.

Can be accessed Direct from SAP

Uses STT Lesson Manager

Accessing Content

Translating content in Other Languages

• All objectives and tasks were translated into French

• Screens remained in the original language

• A translation agency was used to save time

• STT automatically produced a document exclusively for use by the translation agency

• The French text was copied back to a duplicate set of lessons with French STT message sets

Cut and Paste translated text

STT message sets:

Automatic translated text

Translating content in to French

What Next ?

• Next phase

• Italy, Germany, Benelux, Spain,Denmark,Ireland - 6 countries - 17 locations - 5 languages

• Use existing STT content then translate

• In future simpler lessons will be developed to make best use of core STT strengths

• quick development

• quick deployment