Normec Foodcare's Journey with Totara Learn: A Case Study in Multitenancy and Customization

Normec Group is a leading organization in the TICC (Testing, Inspection, Certification, Compliance) industry. Normec tests, inspects and certifies in industries such as, air quality to food safety and management systems. One of the organizations within the Normec Group is Normec Foodcare.

The Challenge

Tom Theloesen is Blended Learning & Development specialist at Normec Foodcare Training & Education (T&E). Together with his colleagues, he is responsible for developing and offering the (blended) learning lines. The learning lines consist of classroom meetings, e-learning modules or a combination. Normec T&E wants to be able to provide all their customers, both internally as externally, with a smooth learning experience, administrated from one site.

The Solution

Two years ago, Normec Foodcare selected Totara Learn as their learning platform. During the selection process, the organization wanted a learning platform in which they could offer their multilingual training offerings, for both their colleagues and their customers, through one learning platform. Totara Learn proved a perfect fit because of its multitenancy capability.

Multitenancy, a standard feature of Totara TXP, allows users and learning activities within the learning platform to be ring-fenced between different “tenants”. Each tenant has its own administrators, who can only access information within their own learning environment. This gives Normec the flexibility to set up the learning platform per sub-organization or brand, and even create separate learning environments for its customers.

Over the past two years, Normec Foodcare has worked on building up and expanding the Normec Academy. Currently, the Normec Academy has more than 4,000 users, spread over 25 tenants. Of these tenants, 21 are specifically set up for Normec customers.

In the first phase of the implementation, the learning environment of Normec Foodcare was set up. Learning and development are highly valued at Normec Foodcare, so a wide range of learning activities where incorporated in the platform. Managers support team members by drawing up joint study plans, which are linked to available learning offerings from the Normec Academy. Extensive reporting capabilities allow managers to continuously monitor employee progress.

Part of going live with the Normec Foodcare Tenant was opening up the learning platform to external audiences, or guest users. Guest users are, for example, food professionals, who must comply with the necessary laws and regulations around food safety. The food professional will find the complete learning offerings online in an open catalog of the Normec Academy.

The open catalog is a representation of Totara Learn as a guest user. As guest users, you can directly register yourself for open-enrollment training, blended learning courses or e-learning modules. When a user decides to take a training course, they create an account via the self-registration page and pay directly or by billing afterwards. An e-learning module is then immediately available to the user.

The Result

Following the successful launch of the Normec Academy, the organization ‘Normec Group’ connected to the learning platform. The Normec Group was looking for a way to offer its team members e- learning modules on integrity and cybersecurity. For this purpose, a separate tenant was set up within the Normec Academy.

This ensures that users are strictly separated between Normec Group and Normec Foodcare. Normec Group team members see other relevant learning activities available to them in addition to the modules on integrity and cybersecurity.

What is unique about Normec Academy is that the tenant design is applied not only for their internal organizations, but even more so for its customers. Next to their standard learning offerings Normec Foodcare Training & Education will gladly go to work to create a customized training program. This can even result in complete annual training plans or on-boarding programs. Together with the customer, they determine not only the learning content, but also the design and management of the learning platform, still with Totara Learn as the underlying system.

For Normec, it goes without saying that the needs of their customers are at the heart of the Normec Academy setup. Using roles, such as tenant administrator and tenant user administrator, customers can do all the management themselves within the tenant of the Normec learning environment. This includes creating users, enrolling users in learning activities and creating new learning activities. Customers can choose to leave the management entirely to Normec or perform it themselves. To efficiently handle setting up new tenants, Normec Academy uses a Tenant Template. This template is copied and then fully customized to the specific needs of the customer.

Where desired, the e-learning modules and the Normec Academy are designed in the branding style of Normec itself, the branding style of the end customer, or a combination of both. Normec ensures that the desired reports are ready, so that tenant administrators and any managers of the end customer always have the right information, without depending on Normec. This is crucial for Normec customers who need to be able to demonstrate in audits that their employees have the correct certifications. This freedom allows the end customer with help from Normec to set up a learning platform completely as they wish.