McLane Foodservice Inc
The Company
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Testimonial
"From a 30,000-foot view, we opted for online training to accomplish several key tasks. All of our employees in all of our locations are receiving a consistent training message. We now have complete and accurate reports of all compliance training. And we are managing costs. Our cost of training is minimized, our productivity is increasing and our team is more knowledgeable about our business."
Mike Youngblood
President
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Owned by Berkshire Hathaway, McLane Company, Inc. is one of the nation's leading distribution and logistics companies employing more than 13,000 employees nationwide. Through two strategic business units, they serve more than 50,000 customer locations around the world including the convenience store, mass merchandise, wholesale club, quick-service restaurant, drug store and movie theater industries.
The Challenge
McLane Company owns and operates McLane Foodservice, a leading supplier to over 18,000 quick-service restaurant chains nationwide. Training has always been a primary concern to the company, so the management and training team at McLane Foodservice turned to PureSafety to provide a scalable, fully-hosted e-Learning solution that could be utilized for both corporate and compliance-based training needs. They also wanted an online training solution that could reflect their corporate brand and culture through both the learning platform and courseware. They found PureSafety to be the perfect tool to help them build a unified McLane Foodservice, as well as provide a mechanism to more efficiently and effectively deliver, track, manage and report on their compliance-based training initiatives – both online and in the classroom.
The Solution
In September of 2001, McLane Foodservice contracted with PureSafety to provide its Enterprise training solution for 3,500 employees at 18 distribution centers across the country for a 3-year period. PureSafety was chosen based on its customer experience within the food distribution industry, exceptional course development services, the ability to customize both the learning platform and courseware, and its flexible and scalable LMS.
The Results
Since the initial launch of PureSafety, McLane Foodservice has seen positive, bottom-line results. Mike Youngblood, President of McLane Foodservice, Inc. had this to say about the company’s use of PureSafety. “From a 30,000-foot view, we opted for online training to accomplish several key tasks. All of our employees in all of our locations are receiving a consistent training message. We now have complete and accurate reports of all compliance training. And we are managing costs. Our cost of training is minimized, our productivity is increasing and our team is more knowledgeable about our business.” As a result of this success, McLane Company, the parent of McLane Foodservice, signed a landmark 5-year contract with PureSafety in April 2003, clearly solidifying their commitment to employee training and safety awareness.
To help ensure the success of your e-Learning program, Joe Delgado, Safety Manager with McLane Foodservice, offers these tips:
Make sure that the IT Department is involved from the very beginning
IT people typically don’t like any surprises, and with most Internet-based programs, there are always hurdles to get over. Bringing the IT staff in early in the process ensures that they understand what you’re looking at buying, how it will affect the corporate network and what the minimum hardware and software requirements are. It’s a good idea to assign your IT people a few online lessons so they see first-hand what the employees will be doing to access their training.
Get Management’s Buy-In and Keep Them Involved
It is imperative that you get the highest levels within the company aware and using your e-Learning solution. The management team needs to understand what it is you’re buying and how it is expected to impact the organization. PureSafety can help with their ROI tools and analysis. At McLane, the use of PureSafety has grown exponentially since our first implementation in 2001. We have grown from focusing solely on safety, and are now expanding into HR and other related and unrelated training areas. PureSafety has become so entrenched within our company that the presidents and general managers of each division within McLane are now asking for the training reports when traveling to various locations throughout the company.
Get Your Employees Excited About Training Online
For some, the move to training online is an easy one. For others, it can be a difficult road. At McLane, we started our company-wide launch of PureSafety by offering incentives for completing training. PureSafety worked with us to design the incentives to match with the McLane Trainer design. We also offered one-on-one assistance to any employees who didn’t feel comfortable using computers or had questions about PureSafety. This process went a long way in ensuring that training was being completed on time.
Keep Each Location Informed
Communicating the progress of implementation keeps everyone informed of what they can expect and what will be expected from them at start up. Advise them of the rollout schedule, administrator training options, scheduled training times and dates, and expectation of completions. You may want to have comment sheets available in your training areas in order to gain feedback on any issues that may need to be handled with that specific teammate or employee.
