With dedicated data to long-term growth and better forecasting
Quality “made by STIHL” is a core brand promise that dates all the way back to 1926. Since then, the one-man operation founded by Andreas Stihl in southern Germany has blossomed into an international mechatronics company.
Today, STIHL is the world’s top-selling chainsaw brand. The company employs over 20,000 people and has a presence in 160 countries across five continents.
To watch this video, marketing cookies must be accepted. Click on the play button to accept. You can find more information in our cookie banner and in the privacy policy.
How to share decades of knowledge
All STIHL tools, whether chainsaws, lawnmowers or hedge clippers, are high quality, safe and easy to use, and built to last. Therefore, many people keep their STIHL tools their whole life and have them serviced and repaired at their local specialised dealerships.
Consequently, employees at the 50,000 dealerships worldwide must be able to repair any older model at any time. And to enable that, employees and sales partners need access to detailed information on all STIHL products. This information needs to be in digital form, quick to access, and available worldwide.
One learning platform for all
STIHL needed to ensure staff could access its product and service training courses at any time, from anywhere worldwide. So, in 2020, the company decided to implement the learning management system (LMS) developed by imc AG.
imc business consultant David Jost advised STIHL on the implementation of the imc Learning Suite. “The fact that STIHL is structured into several national operating companies posed a particular challenge,” he says. “Between them, they had six different systems that now had to be migrated in standardized form to our LMS. Hence, we had to discuss the requirements in great detail and run through a range of scenarios.”
STIHL e-learning and training manager Leandra Deininger was the customer contact for this project.
“We also attached huge importance to delivering a quality learning experience,” she says. “We wanted all users – from internal STIHL staff to dealers – to be able to find exactly the learning content they need, quickly and easily. And for that, the system had to be simple and intuitive to get to grips with.”
Better forecasting thanks to learning analytics
After the global rollout of the system and the progressive retirement of the legacy systems, STIHL intends to go a step further. It wants to put its data to work. This is where the imc Learning Platform’s learning analytics dashboard functionality comes in. It can be used to visualize learning success.
As David Jost explains, this is about more than tallying up the number of courses completed. Or even calculating average training hours. It’s about providing answers to questions like the following:
- How can we enable our course managers to make sound decisions based on solid data?
- How can we enable learners to achieve optimal learning?
- How and in what way do professional development courses contribute to corporate objectives?
Once you have answers to these questions, learning programmes can be aligned with long-term corporate strategy. The impact of this corporate learning on achievement of the corporate strategy can then be visualised using learning data.
