Developing agricultural engineers with limited internet access

Lely, founded in 1948, directs all its efforts towards creating a sustainable, profitable and enjoyable future in farming for its customers.

As a highly innovative company with high-tech solutions delivered to clients in a worldwide network, it is important to have well-trained staff and operators.

Totara Partner Bright Alley helped Lely get a grip on the certification process and set the stage for the rollout of online learning throughout the company.

The Challenge

Lely needed to build a strong foundation to enable them to realise their vision for technology-enabled learning. There were three main areas of focus:

• New employees – to be able to get up to speed quickly to do their work effectively
• Current employees – to develop their abilities following Lely’s strategy and future direction
• High-potential employees – to prepare for and develop towards their next potential role.

Lely identified that an LMS could help them achieve all of these things, and decided to look for the best solution.

The Solution

Lely decided to work with Totara Partner Bright Alley, opting for Totara Learn as their learning management system of choice.

Totara Learn is used for the registration and administration of certifications. All historic training results were imported into Totara Learn, giving Lely a clear overview of the existing skills and knowledge in the organisation.

For Lely, getting the learning history in one place was just the beginning. Field engineers often work on large farms with little or no access to the internet. In order to operate the high-tech products of Lely, they need a valid certification. Totara Learn made this possible.

When users become certified to use specific products, the certification is pushed from the LMS to the active directory. This allows Lely to give automated personalised access to field engineers, enabling them to operate specific products such as milking robots or advanced harvesting machines.

Totara Learn also facilitates the shift towards online learning, allowing users to access training anywhere worldwide. New products can be introduced in a consistent, interactive way. The face-to-face module will help Lely to organise events where knowledge and new innovations can be discussed.

The Results

Totara Learn is for Lely a very important tool for the future. It will give them a single platform upon which all their learning activities take place, with all their learning history combined into this system.

Lely’s managers and learning administrators are now fully in control of their certification process, and can give automated personalised operating access for their products via a smart connection with the active directory. This innovative approach ensures that the highest possible standards are maintained across the organisation, keeping field engineers safe no matter where they are working.

“With Totara Learn, we have succeeded in our quest for one global learning system, to manage our learning everywhere in the world. As a high-tech company with a global presence, it is important for Lely to make sure the quality of sales and services is similar all over the world. Totara Learn helps us to manage this, to make sure people have the right capabilities to work with our products. As well as this, with Totara Learn we can ensure that learning and knowledge is available anytime, anywhere. As many employees work remotely, a system like Totara is key. We have also experienced Totara as a system, which can deal with many different languages and is updated continuously to meet new demands.”