Sidel's Totara Learn platform supports its dynamic blended learning programme

The Sidel Group is formed by the union of two strong brands, Sidel and Gebo Cermex. Together, they are a leading provider of equipment and services for packaging liquid, food, home and personal care products in PET, can, glass and other materials.

With over 40,000 machines installed in more than 190 countries, the Group has nearly 170 years of proven experience, with a strong focus on advanced systems, line engineering and innovation.

The Sidel Group’s 5,000+ employees worldwide are passionate about providing complete solutions that fulfil customer needs and boost the performance of their lines, products and businesses. Delivering this level of performance requires that they continuously understand their customers’ challenges and commit to meeting their unique goals.

The company does this through dialogue, and by understanding the needs of their clients’ markets, production and value chains, to support maximum lifetime productivity to its full potential.

The Challenge

Recently Sidel migrated its LMS into Totara in order to fulfil strategic goals in their global training. The challenge included three main points:

• develop highly customised dashboard and catalogue in order to manage all type of training for all the personnel (face to face and e-learning), according to job profiles
• create complex recurring training paths for Field Service Engineers qualifications, upon different types of equipment and profiles
• manage competences assessment and development for internal Project Managers Academy.

The Solution

Sidel had already been using e-learning for many years with about one hundred of developed courses. Once upgraded to Totara Lear, Sidel soon started creating programs for technical training of Field Service Engineers and general employees’ induction.

It was really important, indeed, to simplify users’ experience in the portal with a new dashboard both simple and flexible to satisfy different viewer’s profiles needs in terms of many kind of audiences, internal and external. MediaTouch decided to approach this need creating the new user dashboard customizing Totara menu, in order to maintain a full possibility of audience based visibility for all the dashboard items.

 The catalog was totally redesigned in order to visualize icons, abstracts, training cards and main characteristics of the training, including the “coming soon” and the “just released” courses. Now, from the catalog each user, according to the specific visibility, can create his/her learning plan for manager’s evaluation and approval.

 As a second point to satisfy the complex need to create recurring training paths for Field Service Engineers qualifications, upon different types of equipment and profiles MediaTouch created tools for Administrators and Competence Development Managers to allow them to create and assign visually to FSE “programs of programs”. Each “program of programs” consists of an articulate path of e-learning, workshop and face to face training to reach and maintain a specific qualification. The qualifications are in order of tens.

On the FSE side the qualification path appears as a specific type of training inside the main dashboard, thanks to the audience based visibility characteristic of the customized dashboard.

 The third need was accomplished with another customized block for Project Managers. This block allows the Project Managers to self assess the actual status of their abilities through multiple and detailed criteria. On this base managers can revise the self assessment of PMs and set gaps from actual level to expected one.

To fill the gap for each knowledge area/skill the system automatically suggests the specific training by linking specific courses in the catalog.

The Results

Sidel training portal developments were gradually implemented during the 2017 without any stop in running the LMS.

The process is still going on as the general user dashboard has been designed in order to keep on hosting new developments, for specific users’ profiles such as the Lean specialists which will be the next target audience to have a specific block in order to manage their competence assessment and development.

Totara flexibility has allowed Sidel to reach important results in terms of developing a complete and dynamic management system for their evolving training needs.

We can say that for Sidel this is a kind of open process which is able to proactively support their increasing needs in terms of training, creating a win-win relationship between customer and service provider.

“The Sidel e-learning portal is an integral part of our Blended Learning strategy, where teaching is partly carried out digitally and partly face-to-face in hands-on training sessions. This results in greatly improving employees’ skills, safety, and productivity as well as contributing to minimise costs in the long term. Moreover, the current status of the portal enables easy adoption by staff from customer’s side.” – Francesca Pisu – Sidel Training Team Manager