Abbott: 100% offline L&D environment cuts costs by 50%
SENLA creates a custom learning and development solution for thousands of Abbott's sales managers.
Recognizing the need for change
Abbott is a global leader in Health Care with 135 years of history operating in over 160 countries. They recognize that every person shares a similar purpose: living the best life possible. Their mission is to create life-changing technology, be it blood sugar monitors, testing half the world’s blood donations, or easing chronic pain. It’s a company that’s driven by technology at its core.
Abbott wanted to invest more in their employees through efficient L&D initiatives. There were a lot of disadvantages to the current system:
- trainers used different programs, which resulted in a disjointed experience for learners,
- there was no integration with the existing HR system,
- it wasn't fully available offline if the training was happening somewhere remote,
- there was no way to analyze any data.
Choosing the right partner
Abbott sought to partner with a technology company to deploy and measure its comprehensive L&D campaigns with an expandable solution that could scale to the demands of thousands of employees worldwide.
And just as Abbott is in the business of creating life-changing technology, SENLA builds business-changing technology.
Our client appreciated the mature and solid architectural vision suggested during the discovery phase, SENLA’s flexibility in the development process, and our prior experience in delivering complex business solutions.
"They deliver, no matter what. Whatever the problem is, they'll create a unique solution for you.
I've never heard the team say: it’s impossible. They would go through the requirements and the scope and would come up with an opportunity to use technology in a way that no one had ever used before."
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Thinking about the people
When you build a new technological product that needs to work with existing business processes and systems, you need to take into account how your solution will affect the people who are running it and the organization in general.
Will it make their lives easier? Will it allow them to invest more time into learning and reflecting? Will it decrease the human error factor? Will it help align manifold departments and their objectives with the general business goal?
This was our initial stage: figuring out how we can improve existing processes and make people’s lives easier, and align them with a unified goal.
"The greatest challenge is connecting people by aligning them with a single goal. It's not technology. If you know how to connect a group of people, translating it into the language of technology becomes much easier. That’s what this project was all about. Oh, and we had to deliver it in four months!"
Operating a lean startup in a corporate environment
When we learned that the client expected an MVP in just four months, we realized that it wasn't going to be your usual corporate project. We had to move fast and iterate even faster.
We decided to adopt the Lean Startup methodology for this project, as it had a proven way to test ideas and deliver working solutions on tight deadlines. In addition to our regular 2-week sprints, we would show demos to the Abbott team every Friday to get their input.
In the true fashion of a startup, we had to come up with new roles to support trainers on-site delivering L&D campaigns with our new solution. We had set up a dedicated support team available 24/7 whenever there was a big learning event in the company. They would ensure that things were running smoothly and would quickly fix any issues. This support team has been working for 2 years now.
Building a solution for multiple stakeholders
We came up with a solution that had 4 modules and covered all the requirements of 3 groups of stakeholders requesting the following features:
L&D
- Program design and development
- Ability to generate custom workflows and agendas
- Design custom role-playing and team-building exercises
- Gamification mechanics
- 100% availability offline
- Certification
- SCORM support
HR
- Skills assessment by person, team, and department
- Unified reports generation for every L&D initiative
- Company-wide analytics
- Seamless integration into the current system
- Automatic ticketing for live events
- Automatic event agendas generation
Admin
- Security
- MDM (Mobile Device Management)
- Auto-generated mobile apps
- Integration with the existing corporate solutions
The value: Weeks-long process optimized to hours, cost cut by 50%
"With SENLA’s solution, we optimized a process that took weeks to just a few hours. All of our business stakeholders are happy with the results. Everything runs smoothly. It’s like magic."
SENLA helped Abbott create a custom L&D solution to assess, track, and improve the skills of their sales departments.
- Abbott reduced training cost and time by 50%, and increased sales to medical institutions by 4%.
- The new solution is available online and is accessible 100% offline so that trainers don’t have to rely on spotty internet connection in remote locations.
- The statistical module collects all the necessary data for the HR team and is fully integrated with their system. This empowers Abbott to make better hiring decisions based on data and focus on the learning initiatives that bring tangible business results.
- Auto-generated mobile apps allow for customizing the seminar process to consider local requirements and learners’ preferences.
- MDM allows administrators to deploy the apps fast and securely.
The success of the project required Abbott and SENLA to adopt new ways of working internally, offer and broaden their services and ultimately learn how to align teams with a single purpose through technology.