I know I do. And most of the things I like, from laptops and smartphones to cars and hi-fi speakers are created by the aptly named manufacturing industry.
It’s really difficult to overstate the importance of the manufacturing sector for the economy. It creates jobs, attracts investments and feeds exports.
It’s also highly competitive and, contrary to the stereotype of the unskilled “factory worker”, it’s increasingly knowledge driven. For a company to be productive, competitive and profitable in the global manufacturing arena, a skilled workforce is not just a nice-to-have asset, but an essential part of the success recipe.
Are your employees able to respond and adapt to the introduction of new manufacturing infrastructure and technologies? Are you prepared for the inevitable retirement of your older and more skilled personnel? How fast and smooth is the transition of new employees? Can you handle increased seasonal demand?
eLearning can help you address these challenges in a reliable, scalable and cost-effective way — and a learning management system (LMS) like eFront is the right tool to get the job done.
Employee orientation
Employee orientation is the task of introducing new employees to their working environment and giving them the basic information that they require to be productive pronto — including your company’s operating procedures, policies, restrictions and guidelines.
Being in the manufacturing industry, you obviously understand the great benefits and importance of automation.
eFront lets you automate employee orientation and training — so that you can concern yourself with meeting your production and shipping deadlines, as opposed to searching for classroom space and scheduling training classes.
With eFront, instructors can organize orientation material in accessible units, and include text, video, audio, images, PDFs, PowerPoint presentations, and even online content. They can also create tests and quizzes to help access their students’ training progress — complete with automated grading and detailed statistics.
What’s more, in an industry such as manufacturing, riddled with regulations and bureaucratic ordinances, eFront’s tracking of training attendance can, in case of legal dispute, serve as proof that your business has informed its employees about environmental protection laws, safety procedures etc.
Of course consult with your legal team first, as this might not be the case in your jurisdiction.
Training
If you want to stay ahead of the competition, it is important to be able to adapt quickly as opportunities present themselves. A new niche market or a sudden surge in demand can require reassignments across the production process, the assembly line or the plant.
Plus, there are always new hires, including temps hired to cover seasonal demand or some sudden big manufacturing contract.
eLearning makes adapting to increased training needs easy and, something that’s especially important when tight margins are involved, cost effective. It also enables your employees to follow their training at their own pace, minimizing business disruptions that can be costly when you have tight production deadlines to meet.
An eLearning based solution will also help if your training material has to change frequently (new assembly lines, the latest green energy rules, new safety procedures, new infrastructure, etc.), since it allows you to update all your courses, re-use and expand content, and share courses instantly between different departments, facilities and plants, anywhere in the world.
You also get the flexibility to choose whether to run all of your training from a central location for complete control, or install dedicated LMS servers in each branch or facility.
Plus, with eFront’s integration with course marketplaces, such as OpenSesame, you can even buy ready-made, professional grade courses in thousands of topics — allowing your instructors to focus on covering your organization’s custom training needs instead of re-creating material that’s common across your whole industry.
Last, but not least, eFront’s comprehensive reporting system will give you detailed statistics for your employees’ attendance, progress and understanding of your training material.
Knowledge retention
All organizations have a few employees whose experience is crucial for their day to day operation, or for handling some special crisis scenarios that occur once in a while. This can be especially true in the manufacturing industry, where even the smallest plant often has a multitude of roles, responsibilities and procedures.
Ideally, of course, this shouldn’t be the case — and with eFront it doesn’t have to be. eFront will help you store this valuable information in a formalized and easily accessible way that can be consulted by existing employees and taught to new hires.
Storing that knowledge in an eLearning platform, as opposed to some document management system, or worse, a few word files nobody would bother to read, makes it instantly usable for training employees and new hires, allowing you to leverage all of your LMS’ eLearning features.
An industrial revolution in training
If you’re looking for a modern, capable LMS platform for your manufacturing industry training needs, take eFront for a test drive today, and join thousands of satisfied customers, including several multinational companies and organizations in both the private and public sectors.
