The Right Content, to the Right Person, at the Right Time: 360Learning x SAP Makes Knowledge Accessible to Arkema’s Global Workforce

The team

Gauthier Danloux

Digital Learning & Collaborative Workplace Project Manager, Arkema

Thomas Dorynek

Senior Director, HXM Value Advisory, SAP SuccessFactors

Yves Taupin

Director of Learning, Talent Development & Culture, Arkema

Clémence Marin-Pache

Digital Learning Officer, Arkema

Steve Dawes

Head of Independents - UK, Bostik

Chrystal Yeung

HR Systems and Personal Development Assistant - UK, Bostik

Solange Camarada

Digital Learning Manager & Collaborative Workplace, Arkema

Challenges

Arkema was looking for an innovative training solution to address a complex equation:

• Managing sustainable growth: With a growth strategy primarily based on acquisitions (4 in the last 8 years), the group was looking to create and maintain a unified culture under the banner of "One Arkema."

• Recruiting, developing and retaining the best talent: Like all major companies, Arkema needed to attract, and, above all, develop the skills of its employees.

• Fostering interoperability between HR solutions: The various L&D applications were not connected to each other, which resulted in hours of data reprocessing, bugs, and ultimately a poor user experience.

• Improving the admin experience: The legacy training system was too complex for administrators to manage on a daily basis.

• Offer a broad access to knowledge: Arkema has over 21,000 employees and operates in 55 countries worldwide. Offering personalized, vetted, relevant content to the right people at the right time wasn’t possible with the legacy system.

Something had to change to support Arkema’s global ambitions.

Solution

Defining a new ambition

Before considering a solution, the L&D team at Arkema set new goals for its digital learning strategy:

Following tests in real-life settings at pilot plants and at the group’s headquarters, 360Learning met all of Arkema’s requirements:

• Connecting with internal applications, specifically SAP SuccessFactors, Arkema’s HRIS and LMS

• Breaking down the barriers to knowledge through an open content catalog, with soft skills training available 100% on demand

• Supporting content creation by internal experts on the field, especially at industrial plants.

A few months later, Arkema’s MyLearning platform, powered by 360Learning, was ready to launch across the group’s geographies.

Following the successful launch, let’s review the three main pillars of this project.

Connect HR and L&D strategies to engage employees

Since Arkema uses SAP Successfactors for its LMS and HRIS, the new Digital Learning solution had to connect with the existing system.

With a modern LMS and a dedicated SAP SuccessFactors connector, 360Learning was able to seamlessly integrate with the existing HRIS, bringing together HR workflows and the learning catalog into SAP SuccessFactors. With its open platform approach and over 300 applications available in the SAP Store, SAP SuccessFactors was also able to easily sync with 360Learning.

This partnership combines the best of digital human capital management and collaborative learning solutions into an intelligent ecosystem. By automatically importing learning statistics from 360Learning into SAP SuccessFactors, Arkema’s L&D team can better understand the impact of training on the HR strategy and avoid hours of double data entry.

Users navigate their learning environment through a single entry point for a 100% integrated experience via a SSO (Single Sign-on) connection:

• Learners browse online and blended learning catalogs, and are redirected to 360Learning

• Authors create training courses on 360Learning’s authoring tool

• Managers analyze team learning statistics, and validate blended training workflows

With this synchronization, learning analytics from 360Learning are uploaded into the SAP Successfactors LMS, under the “completed training” tab.

Gauthier attests to the ease of use of this new workflow:

"The integration between 360Learning and SAP Successfactors is done in a complementary and connected approach. The automation is extremely robust, centralizes all of our training data in one single place and saves us hours of admin work!"

Aggregating a rich content catalog into the flow of work

Next up, the Arkema team wanted to address learning needs by breaking down barriers to knowledge, and achieve upskiling at scale.

With 360Learning’s LXP features set, learners access the best libraries of soft skills training courses produced by leading institutions, all aggregated on the HRIS portal. In a couple of clicks, the course will launch on 360Learning, all seamlessly operated via SSO.

With teams distributed across 55 countries, one might think providing learning experiences personalized for specific languages could end up in an L&D admin nightmare. Think again! With its Globalization solution designed for multilingual training management, 360Learning supports Arkema’s global L&D vision. By automatically surfacing courses in the learner’s preferred language, 90% of Arkema employees access training in their native language, without admin hassle.

Gauthier speaks to the impact of the Globalization solution:

"If your company operates internationally, the Globalization solution is for you. It makes a single training course available to an audience of learners in multiple languages. We're able to release our training courses in 14 languages and reach almost 100% of the group in their native language. We just translated some content into Malay since our teams in the field don’t speak English."

Capturing and sharing internal expertise in collaborative academies

In a sector as complex as specialty chemicals, internal experts play a key role in passing on the right techniques, supported by a strong culture of mutual support within the Arkema group.

This couldn't be a better environment for 360Learning's collaborative learning academies. Thanks to the authoring tool and its intuitive UX, business experts can create modules in less than 17 minutes, without any prior expertise in instructional design.

Gauthier shares that this capability proved decisive during the project pilot:

"We launched the pilot in one of our factories, under real-life conditions. Authors on the ground were able to easily create content, and adopted the tool and its hyper-intuitive interface very quickly!"

To capitalize on in-house knowledge, Gauthier and his team took matters one step further by breaking down the barriers to creation, making it possible to create training courses truly relevant to teams working on the field. With a link directly available on Arkema's intranet, employees can easily volunteer to receive author permissions and start creating their own courses to address their team's needs. Gauthier shares that his team frequently receives new requests from aspiring content creators.

In addition to helping their peers, internal knowledge sharing champions reap the rewards of their commitment in real-life, too. HR teams and managers are notified whenever in-house authors have published more than five training courses.

Results

Following the launch of the MyLearning platform, all indicators exceeded Arkema’s L&D team’s expectations:

• The platform has 9,810 learners, 140% (!) of its target number of connected learners.

• The on-demand training approach went above all expectations, with over 2,300 learners having taken a course from the online catalog. An outperformance above target by 70%!

• There are 64 active authors on the platform, as part of a project to digitize factory training in France, Europe, the United States, and Malaysia

• An average of 143 courses created by the authoring team

• 93% positive reactions on the platform

• Training courses are available in 14 languages, accessible to all Arkema Group employees, including subsidiaries.

“360Learning has really changed the learning experience of our employees.” - Clémence Marin-Pache, Digital Learning Officer, Arkema

Next steps

Following this successful launch, the L&D team is better equipped than ever to meet the immense challenge of bridging the skills gap. A challenge that Gauthier sums up in one phrase: "finding the right talent, the right position at the right time, with the right skills."

In the future, Arkema can count on the 360Learning Upskilling Playbook to achieve its transition to a skills-based organization. By building an AI-powered dynamic source of truth for skills, 360Learning customers will be able to structure their skills data by tagging jobs with skills requirements and administering employee skill assessments.