How Ideagen created intuitive, secure, and scalable training

We had a large audience for training (2,500 users), located throughout two countries and working a variety of 24×7 shift patterns, which needed to be covered quickly and consistently. Online training was the natural choice.As one of the world’s fastest-growing software companies, Ideagen is a top software provider for organizations in heavily regulated industries. Companies working in aviation, banking, finance, life sciences, healthcare, and manufacturing use Ideagen’s products in their work daily.

Over the last decade, the company has increased its client base by more than 23000%, and its employee numbers by more than 5000%.

But consistent growth is not without challenges. As Ideagen’s customer and employee bases grew, so did its training needs.

The training challenge

Ideagen provides various software to over 5,000 customers located all over the world, working in highly regulated industries. Before customers are able to get the most out of the software, they need to be trained in how to use it. Ideagen needed a way to deliver training that was intuitive, scalable, and secure.

“Industries such as life sciences and hospitals … airlines as well, people’s lives depend on them, so you need to know that your staff are competent when using our software,” said Ideagen’s Group E-learning Manager, Richie Hewitt.

Back in 2008, Ideagen began delivering software training using its own internal platform.

“We developed a solution internally which basically just allowed users to watch training videos and answer multiple-choice questions. Although it worked well for our customers at the time, as technology matured along with the needs of our customers, we identified the need for a dedicated eLearning system.”

As the company continued to grow, so did its need for a new learning system. One that could train customers regardless of their location, with maximum functionality.

Why Ideagen chose eFront

As a company that needed to train more than just its own internal employees, having the right learning management system was critical. Since Ideagen is a software company itself, Richie and the team knew that customers only stick with a piece of software when they understand how to use it. That meant that offering effective training on how to use their products was key to keeping existing customers and acquiring new ones.

“Obviously, we deliver the best products we can to our customers. So we made the decision that we’re going to buy the best we can for our customers.”

But choosing the best learning management system is easier said than done.

“There seem to be more learning management systems than there are grains of sand on the beach.”

After trying all the big names, Richie concluded that eFront was the one to best fit the company’s needs.

“One of the key requirements from some of our customers was, they don’t want to have two or three different learning management systems … they want to have it under one roof … we couldn’t do that with the solution that we had before. Therefore, one of the requirements when I chose eFront was, can we add our own content, and let the customers upload theirs.”

And since Ideagen has 100s of customers to train, the learning management system they chose had to be able to support multi-tenancy and data segregation, all while maintaining security.

“Obviously if you’ve got hundreds of different organizations, each with their own content, their own learners, and things, it’s absolutely vital that nobody sees anything belonging to another organization.”

Three years ago, Ideagen made the switch to eFront and made the platform their own. To the company’s customers, eFront is known as the “Academy,” and it’s the place where they access all the training they need.

The results

Today, Ideagen uses eFront to train both internal employees, as well as customers. Over 600 of Ideagen’s customers use eFront, with more than 15,000 users in the Academy.

“It’s very easy to use, a lot of our customers like the fact that you log in, you know where everything is, everything is clear and clean, it’s easy to use … you cut down the number of logins, and barriers to education, and people are more likely to take that training.”

Increasing and maintaining training completion rates is a crucial part of Ideagen’s success. When customers are trained on how to best use their software and how to get the most out of their products, they’re more likely to turn into long-term customers and recommend Ideagen to others.

“The benefit to us is that if people are using our product more, if they’re using the Academy more, then their staff are getting better training, which means they’re using our products more … and it boosts customer retention through improved training.”

Going beyond the functionalities of Ideagen’s original internal training platform, eFront supports interactive courses, quizzes, reporting, and certifications.

“And the fact that they can upload their own eLearning alongside it, it’s just the place to go for some of our customers, so that users can take their learning in bite-sized chunks, all in the same place, and it disrupts their normal working life as little as possible.”

For the last three years, eFront has helped Ideagen confidently grow its client and staff base, without the worry of potential security or data breaches. With better training and improved completion rates, customers are able to get the maximum possible value out of the company’s products.

“The new solution was 100 times better … you need to know that your staff are competent when using our software, and the best way of doing that is through an eLearning platform such as eFront.”

Richie Hewitt

Group E-learning Manager, Ideagen

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