Posted by What does an agri-business operator with presence in 9 countries do when it comes to learning and development? A market leader in tropical hybrid vegetable seeds, the over three-decade-old group has a huge presence in Asia – such as the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, and India. However,in alignment with its growth strategy, it has been looking to register its presence in Europe and North America as well.
Realizing the need to consolidate its position and simultaneously enter new markets, the group took a giant leap 3 years ago! It chose to set up an academy that would use a learning management system (LMS) to serve as its chief vehicle and tool for global knowledge-sharing and intellectual property management. Given that the nature of business itself is blended, European style of seeding with Asian vegetable farming techniques, it was obvious that the LMS had to use experience as the foundation for imparting training to its people.
Three years ago, the group assigned Origin Learning with the task of setting up its LMS to support its aggressive global expansion strategy. What did the assignment entail? Read on to know more.
Growing annually at around 15%, the group was upbeat about its hiring plans. Its plan was to double its workforce by 2017 and upskill its existing employees enabling them to qualify for both technical and management positions. Internal employees had already taken up about 32% of the senior technical and management positions thereby providing scope for scaling-up on the resource side.
Charting out a clear career path and delivering a training program across 5 country locations and targeting 3,000 employees were among the stated goals of the proposed LMS.
Origin Learning came out with an e-learning platform as the primary solution to equip the workforce located in various global sites with the most current, relevant, and updated knowledge about the agri-business – to be precise, the seed business.
Origin designed and deployed an LMS that had multifarious advantages. One of them was that of nurturing and harnessing social and collaborative learning at the workplace. The endeavor was to create an operating mode for delivering content on a multi-lingual learning platform – that could make the content available in multiple languages across geographies with the added advantage of being device-agnostic. So, the mobile-device enabled solution allowed users to access knowledge even in remote locations such as farms.
Some of the many benefits are listed below:
- Readily-available information and knowledge to start up new centers in locations such as Myanmar, Tanzania, and Midwest Africa
- Enabling best practice sharing among seedsmen located across multiple member countries
- Effective knowledge transfer by capturing and storing seedsmanship expertise data for the next generation of employees
- Ability to get on-the-job training through ready reckoner – videos, learning snippets
To give an example of how effective the LMS proved to be, we can take the case of the cross-pollination technique. Farmers in one location can now see and learn from their counterparts in other locations where the cross-pollination technique had led to better water management.
In conclusion, it would be apt to say that the experience of working with the agri-client sowed the seeds of delivering a holistic learning solution by Origin. To elaborate, the technology-centric learning company was able to provide a simple and seamless solution using the combination of multi-lingual, social, collaborative, and device-agnostic technologies, among others.