BAS Truck Center leverages the power and versatility of Totara Learn

BAS Truck Center is one of the largest truck and company car dealers in the Netherlands. Many new trucks and company vehicles are sold and maintained on a daily basis.

In order to optimally facilitate all the processes surrounding this, BAS Truck Center switched to a new dealer management system (DMS) in January 2017. The DMS is a system in which all operations, warehouse management, maintenance and customer support issues are registered.

Everyone at BAS Truck Center uses this DMS, from the administration department to the warehouse employees and mechanics. But how do they ensure that everyone is well integrated into the new system and that they are kept up to date with developments?

“We were looking for a tool that could help us with the implementation of the new dealer management system, with the aim of being able to use it holding-wide in the future.” – Jordi van Lijssel

The Solution

The solution for BAS Truck Center was to use online courses and simulations to train employees in the use of the new DMS. There was also a need to set up a single, central platform to facilitate further employee training.

We talked to Jordi van Lijssel, Business Consultant at BAS Truck Center and Michel van de Pol, training coordinator at BAS Trucks, about the development of the BAS Academy.

“Because of the flexibility of the system and the extensive possibilities, we chose Totara Learn.”

One system that everyone can use

The BAS Truck Center DMS is like one big database with a wealth of information. Everyone within the organization must be able to use the DMS in the same way. During the implementation, everyone had to get exactly the same information.

E-learning was the perfect solution for arranging the provision of information, because it allowed them to reach all employees at once. In addition, BAS Truck Center wanted to create modules with simulations, so that employees could immediately put into practice the knowledge they just had acquired.

BAS Truck Center’s wish that everyone should be able to use it also applied to the learning management system (LMS) to be able to offer e-learning. As an organization, they are used to being in control, which is why they were looking for a learning management system in which they could do and develop a lot themselves.

Totara Learn

When they found out that they needed an LMS for the roll-out of e-learning, they went looking for a supplier. Together with Totara Partner The Courseware Company, they looked at how BAS Truck Center could best set up the LMS, with the added bonus that they could do a lot themselves.

Totara Learn is a flexible learning management system. Courses, trainings and other learning modules can be offered both online and offline (classroom). It is a flexible system: everything can be created, administered and published with it.

“We wanted to create a learning environment that fits in perfectly with BAS, complete with its own corporate identity, self-developed e-learning and possibilities to expand it further in the future.” – Jordi van Lijssel, Business Consultant at BAS Truck Center

The possibility to expand it further in the future came quickly when Michel joined BAS Trucks as a training coordinator. They killed two birds with one stone.

“Parallel to the implementation of the new DMS and the corresponding training and simulation modules at BAS Truck Center, I saw the use of Totara Learn as a great opportunity to design the range of courses and training at BAS Trucks. This is how last year – as we call it ourselves – the BAS Academy was created for everything that BAS Trucks has to do with the learning and development of our employees.”
– Michel van de Pol, training coordinator at BAS Trucks

The BAS Academy

At BAS Trucks, Totara Learn is therefore mainly used to train and support employees. In the BAS Academy, new employees are given an introduction plan and current employees can attend various courses (only once) and programs (several courses on a subject).

A salesperson who receives a technical question, for example, no longer has to call the workshop each time, but can instead attend a course at the Academy. This is a lot more efficient for both them and the mechanics.

In addition, the BAS Trucks Academy has a training agenda with various classroom training courses and performance in the form of evaluations is kept up to date as input for the end-of-year discussions.

At BAS Truck Center, the Academy is for the time being mainly a reference work, in which the working methods of the various processes are kept up to date. If it happens that a (warehouse) employee has never done a certain action before – for example a return order – he can now easily look it up in the Academy.

Experiences

For both BAS Trucks and BAS Truck Center, the use of Totara Learn is of great value.

Jordi said,“The advantage of Totara Learn is that it is so versatile, you can really do anything with it. You can already see how of our different business units now use the Academy.”

Michel noted that“Before the arrival of Totara Learn, we did something with learning and development, but now it really has become an Academy and people respond very positively to that. We can streamline the training process, monitor employee developments and continue to improve and supplement the training offering with new content.”

The Future

Because the training and development of employees at BAS Trucks is such a success, they also want to expand it to BAS Truck Center. They have now hired someone who can work full time on the Academy. In addition, they want to expand into BAS Truck Center’s service branch, so that they can roll out a holding company-wide Academy in the future.

The content of the Academy will also continue to develop. They want to optimize the catalog with a better search function and the application of filters, so that employees can find the specific content they are looking for even faster. They will keep working continuously on the provision of information and the content of the courses – so that it is really fun for their employees to look up or check out something in them and to continue to develop themselves in this way.

“The training and development of employees at BAS Trucks is such a success that we are now going to extend it to BAS Truck Center. And we have the ambition to roll out the Academy holding-wide in the future.” – Michel van de Pol