Orica is a publicly owned Australian chemical company employing over 9,000 staff across approximately 30 countries and with revenue of $AUD4 billion annually. Headquartered in Melbourne Australia, the Orica businesses – Orica Mining Services, Fertilizers (Incitec Pivot Limited), Orica Chemicals and Orica Consumer Products – are all leaders in their chosen markets. Orica manufacture and supplies industrial and specialty chemicals, agricultural chemicals and fertilizers, commercial explosives and mining chemicals, paints and other consumer products. Orica is the largest chemical company in the Asia Pacific region. Orica Mining Services is the world’s leading supplier of commercial explosives, a global business with a leading presence in Australia, Asia, Europe, North America and Latin America. Orica’s i-kon™ electronic detonator is widely recognized as the world’s most sophisticated blast initiator.

Orica has been a Notes user since the release of R3. SAP and Notes are the primary application development platforms at Orica. Notes is used for document management, discussion databases, and many custom applications for business processes. Globally there are 72 Domino servers, with a Domino server at all large sites.

In Australia, Orica employ 8 Notes support staff across administration, infrastructure and application support functions. Application development is performed by a mixture of in-house developers and business partners. Company wide, Orica uses over 900 custom Domino databases. Application monitoring allows Orica to retire applications no longer in use.. All employees who use a PC get a Notes user ID.

One of the issues Orica faces is the remoteness of many of their operations. In many regions, communications costs can be very high, so Orica uses Notes Domino replication to place databases right on the local server . Remote users who do not work in an office with a server have local database replicas to also help cut down on communication time/costs.

Orica started their migration by moving the servers to Domino 6 first. Servers were replaced with new hardware and a new server OS. The new servers were all delivered with TLCC’s user training courses. . The users were migrated next, R4.6 to Notes 6. Currently Orica has completed the user migration for the Australian employees, approximately 3,500 users.

The benefits of quality training for users has always been important to Orica. When it came time to plan for user training on Notes 6, Orica considered creating an in-house course, as it had done for previous Notes implementations. While Orica had the resources to create the training they decided that they could buy a course for far less than their in-house training department could create one. Orica's search for Notes user training ended with the discovery of The Learning Continuum Company (TLCC.)

TLCC’s user courses were perfect for Orica’s needs. The course was customizable. This let Orica modify the lessons to fit the way they operated. Since Orica’s employees were migrating from Notes 4 the TLCC Using Notes 6 course was used. Orica has made some modifications to the standard mail template used in Notes 6. They were able to customize the course to match the changes they had made to the mail template. They also changed the lessons to fit certain procedures they use. It was much easier and more cost-effective to quickly modify TLCC’s user course than to create a new course from scratch. Michael Jerkovic, Messaging Product Manager, said “TLCC’s user course are much better than the previous in-house training efforts. The graphics and presentation of the material are very good.”

TLCC’s user course was installed on all the Domino 6 servers. Laptop users got a local replica of the course installed on their laptop when Notes 6 was installed. Employees at offices without a Domino server also got a local replica of the course. This cut down on communication costs.

Orica required every employee to attend a 1.5 hour seminar presented by the training department before the employee got upgraded to Notes 6. In this training session Notes 6 was introduced along with TLCC’s training course. Each employee got a 40 page booklet that referred them back to the TLCC user course for further detailed instructions. Orica also has a standard corporate help (SOE) database that employees use to get help on Orica's’ IT systems and procedures. This help database was modified to include links to the TLCC user course for those topics that matched up such as creating a memo or replicating. Users can do the final exam in the course if they want to test themselves. Orica does not require employees to pass this exam and does not track the results.

The response to the Notes 6 user course has been very positive. The training department is happy because they are able to deliver training at a fraction of the cost of in-house efforts. The IT department was able to easily adopt the course to their needs. Having a training course in a Domino database is a great benefit. This allows Orica to take advantage of Domino 6’s replication and to easily customize the course using a Notes client. The feedback from the users has been very positive.