UDG Healthcare

Launching a global learning and development hub to serve all of UDG Healthcare’s diverse and dispersed worldwide workforce.

Increasing online learning engagement by 1,700% for UDG Healthcare

UDG Healthcare is a global provider of clinical advisory, commercial, communication and packaging services to the healthcare industry. The organisation employs more than 9,000 people, who work across four divisions and several companies operating in 29 countries.

Despite this large and widespread workforce, the group did not have a unified learning and development platform. Instead, employees relied on a single-page compliance system, which could only deliver mandatory training and was deemed to be boring, unengaging and difficult to use.

We were chosen to deliver a new global LMS to:

• House all L&D content throughout the group.
• Host internal training programmes.
• Track learning across the organisation.
• Improve quality and compliance reporting.
• Deliver multi-lingual training to the global workforce.

Centralising learning for a widespread workforce

We worked with UDG Healthcare to launch Greenhouse Learning, its group-wide learning management system. With each of the group’s businesses operating as separate entities, Greenhouse Learning is the only system that is accessed by all 9,000-plus employees worldwide.

Having explored UDG Healthcare’s requirements and complex organisational structure, we identified the Totara Learn learning management system and the integrated learning experience platform (LXP) Totara Engage as the perfect platforms to achieve the project’s goals.

Totara Learn’s array of features immediately introduced much of the key functionality that had been notable in its absence from the previous system, including a dashboard, featured courses, badges and push messages. All of these features have been used to raise awareness of learning opportunities, improve engagement levels and increase compliance.

The powerful Totara reporting system is used to track learning, monitor course completions and maintain compliance levels within specific teams, departments, businesses and divisions, as well as across the group as a whole.

From a standing start of zero L&D courses, the site now has a directory of 300 courses from which to choose — a figure that is increasing all the time — in addition to a suite of mandatory and required learning. In an organisation in which classroom learning is not an option, there is now a centralised structure in place to deliver learning remotely.

With the addition of Totara language packs, learners in each of the 29 countries where UDG Healthcare operates can now complete learning and development in their own language.

In the process, Greenhouse Learning has become a group-wide hub for learning but also information. The site serves as a place that brings people from across the organisation together.

Nowhere is this more true than in the workspaces we created using the Totara Engage feature of the same name. Workspaces act as communal areas for people throughout the organisation who have a shared professional interest, such as using the same system or software in their roles, to interact. Employees in different arms of the organisation who would previously have had no contact with each other are now able to communicate, share best practices and ask questions. This has not only created a series of useful resource spaces serving the whole group, but also delivered a huge saving in administrative costs among administrators and systems owners who would have previously had to field each query by email on a one-to-one basis.

Roll-out of new systems has been simplified dramatically, with multi-million pound projects given their own learning area in which to educate employees throughout the organisation in a cohesive way.

Instant buy-in and seventeen-fold increase in logins

Employee logins immediately increased from 1,000 per month under the previous platform to 18,000 logins in the month of Greenhouse Learning’s group-wide launch. Logins are currently averaging around 13,000 per month — a huge boost for L&D across the organisation.

Previously, there was no learning and development available on a group-wide level, only basic mandatory training. Now there are 1,500 enrolments per month and more than 3,500 courses have been completed in the past six months. UDG Healthcare can easily promote, manage and track learning across its structure.

A group of companies that is necessarily separated into composite parts and scattered around the globe now has a central, unified platform with which to bring all of its employees together. UDG Healthcare can share information, knowledge and learning throughout the organisation, and enjoy all the communication, performance and efficiency benefits that brings.

“The team at Synergy Learning are extremely knowledgeable and extremely professional. No question is too silly; no problem too big. They have been very helpful in all respects. As an LMS administrator with little prior experience in systems, I have been able to rely on their support throughout.”

Lucy Chegwidden | LMS and Compliance Systems Administrator

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