Hunger for Knowledge: Ensuring a Successful LMS Rollout
DoN: a best practice case study
DoN is Austria’s leading privately owned catering company. The name DoN comes from food entrepreneur Josef Donhauser, who founded his first catering business back in 1992.
His motto was “Tailored taste” – a principle that inspires the companies in the DoN group and their 2,000-strong workforce to this day.
The DoN group has garnered success in many areas, including contract catering, travel and lounge catering, and event catering. Its successes also include several restaurants and the well-known “fresh casual” brands VAPIANO and Fat Monk.
Implementing a new learning platform: First impressions count!
During the pandemic, DoN, like many companies, realised that the days of exclusively in-person learning and professional development were over. But the existing open-source solutions were no longer sufficient for the increased demand. The situation called for a learning management system (LMS).
At the same time, DoN was looking for a solution for quickly generating high-quality learning content. A technology that was easy and intuitive to use. A product that allowed all employees – whether kitchen hands, restaurant chefs, on-board service personnel, or logistics staff – to access exciting learning content from any device, anytime.
Cross-organisational collaboration and motivation, with quizzes, chocolate, and imc Express
DoN quickly found the right learning management system: the imc Learning Suite, courtesy of imc Austria.
But the project managers at DoN, Petra Kügele and Martina Riepl, soon realised that a learning platform on its own was not enough. After all, what’s an LMS without content?
Petra Kügele explains: “The LMS was ordered in October 2022 and was rolled out six months after that. But we knew, even before the rollout, that we needed to actively get our people on board. We didn’t want to simply implement a system and then leave the employees to deal with it on their own. We need to keep the workforce highly motivated about learning and professional development, so we wanted an overall communication package.”
DoN was also looking for an easy-to-use authoring tool that supported the independent and rapid creation of learning content. The idea was to be able to integrate new content into the system on a regular basis. And the new imc Express authoring tool fitted the bill perfectly.
A textbook LMS rollout and sustained employee motivation
DoN was very clear about its goals. It needed to have specially created content ready and available in the LMS the minute the latter was rolled out. It wanted to build up curiosity among its employees so that they were hungry for the learning content and would remain positive about the rollout.
To achieve these goals, the project team put together a coherent overall communication package. It also worked closely with other departments, such as HR and marketing.
The project team actively engaged with the employees at their places of work. They showed them the initial results. They explained the idea behind the platform and what blended learning and the pre-existing features were all about. And they handed out branded “stress heart” key rings featuring QR codes, leading to a quiz created using imc Express. As well as humorous anecdotes, this quiz served up an array of fun facts about the DoN group. For example, do you know how many metres of pasta VAPIANO produces? (Answer: 40.5 km of spaghetti and linguine daily.)
This combination of personal workplace outreach, branded give-aways, and networking across various departments meant that the employees were extremely favourably disposed towards the LMS even before its rollout.
All the hard work paid off. DoN’s employees could have been annoyed about the new system – a common response to change in the business world. But they weren’t. Instead, they were excited about it, and they are highly receptive to new learning content. The project team also produced explanatory videos on the LMS – using imc Express – and made them available in the system.
It’s a true success story, as Martina Riepl explains: “People are even asking when we’ll be uploading the next content into the system. That shows our strategy has paid off and that we’ve established positive framing around professional development here at DoN. And we’ll be working to make sure it stays that way!”
