Case Study - Milwaukee Electric Tool Corporation
Milwaukee Electric Tool Corporation is an industry leading manufacturer and marketer of heavy-duty, portable electric power tools and accessories for professional users worldwide. Milwaukee is headquartered in Brookfield, Wisconsin, which is also home to research, new product development, product training, manufacturing support, marketing, sales, human resources and information systems. It has production facilities in six locations in North America. The tools are built in small “cells” in each plant using just-in-time manufacturing techniques to keep inventory at a minimum.
Milwaukee has over 2,000 employees. Approximately 1,000 employees use Notes for e-mail. Notes is more than just e-mail at Milwaukee. It is used for many applications such as expense reporting, customer relationship management (CRM), travel, resource reservations, quality, and human resources. TeamRoom and Sametime are also used. Domino is used for parts of the corporate website. There is one mail server for all the users and a database server. All of the different locations access the Domino servers via the corporate WAN. The sales force uses laptops and replicates many databases locally.
The migration to Notes 6 occurred in the Fall of 2003. Milwaukee migrated the Notes users in phases determined by building. Every two weeks a new building was migrated. First, “super users” were identified in each building and instructed how to migrate to Notes 6. This allowed the super users to gain experience with Notes 6. A side benefit was that the other users saw Notes 6 in action and got excited over the new Notes 6 interface and welcome page. Then the balance of the users in the building were sent an e-mail with the actions required to upgrade to Notes 6. An attached Word document provided more detailed instructions. The users upgraded to Notes 6 by themselves. The users were aware of whom the super users were so they knew who to contact for help. The I.S. Help Desk also provided support if problems were encountered.
The same philosophy used on the plant floor is also used for corporate training at Milwaukee according to Anne Winter, a Learning and Development Analyst at Milwaukee. “When it came time to train the users on Notes 6 we wanted a solution that allowed the users to learn tasks as needed.” TLCC’s Notes 6 user courses were chosen because they provided the modular approach needed to allow the users just-in-time training. Milwaukee placed both the Using Notes 6 and the R5 to Notes 6 User Update courses on their mail server. The courses were slightly modified to fit their needs by removing some of the lessons on topics not used in Milwaukee’s environment. The e-mail with instructions on how to upgrade to Notes 6 included instructions and links to access the TLCC user courses. Remote sales people were sent a CD with the training courses on it so they could take the course without having to be connected to access the training course.
The Help Desk was instructed to not repeat information which was included in the training courses if users called with questions. Instead, they sent the users doclinks to the relevant course lessons in the TLCC user course. The new Notes 6 feature, “Copy Selected as Table” was used to create a table showing the name of the lesson and a doclink to that lesson. The super users were also instructed to show users how to access the course if they had questions on how to use Notes 6. The Help Desk personnel really liked the training courses as a support tool. It saved a significant amount of time when responding to questions and allowed the Help Desk personnel to focus on real support issues instead of providing ad-hoc training.
The discussions database in the courses was not used. The Final Exam was enabled but Milwaukee did not do any tracking of the exam results. The corporate philosophy is that training is highly encouraged by is not required. After the upgrade was completed a log report was run showing 15-20% of the users took the entire course and 50% of the users did at least part of the Notes 6 course. The feedback from the users was excellent. They like the ability to zero right in on a lesson that shows them how to accomplish a task. Many users search the course lessons database to find lessons with certain keywords that describe what they are trying to do. The relevant lessons are then listed allowing the users to receive just-in-time training. The course is still used as a reference many months after all the users were upgraded to Notes 6. New employees are instructed by their managers and the Help Desk to take the user course to learn how to use Notes 6.
TLCC’s user courses provided Milwaukee with the just-in-time training needed to smoothly migrate to Notes 6 and take full advantage of this new platform.
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