CASE STUDY
Luxottica Retail Case Study
Retail
Executive Summary
Challenge Use a robust hosted solution to provide a single point of contact for delivering on boarding, sales, procedural, compliance, leadership and continuing education courses to more than 38,000 employees in more than 6,200 locations worldwide. Solution • SuccessFactors Learning • iContent Results • Luxottica can now pick and choose highly targeted content – and pay only for courses that will be used. • Content can be purchased and available within 24 hours compared to the previous method that had up to a three month-long time frame. • Purchasing, catalog updates and reporting are handled by just one project manager and one system administrator. • Content and the SuccessFactors LMS contributed to the integrated talent management strategy that earned Luxottica eLearning! and Bersin & Associates’ 2008 Learning Leaders Award in the category of Learning Initiative Excellence. Luxottica Retail, a business unit of Italian eyewear giant Luxottica Group, is one of the world’s leading operators of optical stores. With both franchised and company-owned stores, its chains include LensCrafters, Oakley, Pearle Vision, Sunglasses Hut and in-store optical centers for Sears and Target, as well as optical manufacturing centers and wholesale divisions across the globe. In order to train and manage its diverse and geographically distributed 38,000 employee population, Luxottica has invested heavily in implementing job specific, product, leadership, and corporate-wide training programs that utilize custom training content as well as content purchased from third-party vendors. With the drive toward cost-savings, Luxottica investigated new approaches for streamlining its content procurement, administration and management process. In their search,
SUCCESSFACTORS /CASE STUDY
LUXOTTICA RETAIL
Luxottica discovered that leveraging SuccessFactors Systems’ Learning Management Systems (LMS) and iContent solutions together would allow them to achieve both their learning administration and cost-cutting goals. “We just didn’t have the manpower, technology or budget to efficiently and effectively manage and execute our various training programs,” said Angi Willis, Luxottica’s Learning Technology Project Manager. “We needed a solution that would reduce the time and cost for procuring content, administration and delivery to our employees.”
Selecting a Vendor LUxoTTiCA RETAiL DELivERS TRAining To 38,000 EmpLoYEES fASTER, LowER CoST, AnD LESS STAff
Once SuccessFactors was implemented as the learning management system (LMS), the challenge of content hosting remained. “We had a fast and hard delivery date,” Angi says. “But our IT team couldn’t implement a robust content delivery network in just five months. The other issue was manpower: we have one project manager, and one system and content administrator to support 38,000 employees. We didn’t have the bandwidth to set up online and custom courses and put everything into the LMS. Using iContent’s hosted solution solved IT, manpower, and contracting issues. “By hosting our content on SuccessFactors iContent, we also gained access to the Akamai network SuccessFactors uses for delivering content globally, we could never build and maintained such a robust content delivery network for training. In fact, I can get content purchased and available in the catalog within just 24 hours. Plus, because I simply go through iContent, managing content takes half the time it used to.”
Leveraging Existing Contracts
A major advantage was that iContent was able to incorporate course libraries for which Luxottica Retail had already contracted. “For example,” says Angi, “when iContent went live, we still had existing contracts for large, 500-course libraries. iContent created an interface so we could continue to access this content seamlessly for the duration of the contract.”
Trading Generic Libraries for Targeted Content
At the end of the existing contracts, Luxottica elected not to purchase the full libraries. “If you buy third-party courses,” Angi explains, “you usually have to buy entire course libraries and pay about $150 per course to get the few courses you really need. With iContent, that per-course cost may be the same, but instead of buying an entire library of 500 titles, we only buy the 25 courses we’re really going to use. That makes sense for cost-savings.”
Training and Compliance
In addition to providing courses for product knowledge, leadership, and optical training, SuccessFactors tracks compliance training and delivers automatic
SuccessFactors and the SuccessFactors logo are trademarks of SuccessFactors, Inc.© 2011 SuccessFactors, Inc. All rights reserved. www.successfactors.com 1 800 809 9920
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LUXOTTICA RETAIL
“iConTEnT iS SEAmLESS. inSTEAD of SEEing CoURSES AS Coming fRom DiffEREnT ThiRD-pARTY pRoviDERS, oUR EmpLoYEES hAvE onE LEARning Link AnD ExpERiEnCE EvERYThing AS pART of oUR own LUxoTTiCA-bRAnDED
updates to make sure employees are up to speed on legal and federal mandates. Similarly, iContent helps employees stay in step with Luxottica store policies, procedures for handling lab equipment, and loss prevention efforts by making such documents available and accessible across the entire organization. “iContent also manages our entitlement for the content we purchase so we don’t need to monitor and report on how many of our licenses we have used…it is all done automatically. If I need to know how many licenses we have left, I just click a link on the iContent portal. This helps us not only remain compliant from a licensing standpoint, but allows me to more easily forecast my future licensing levels.”
Reporting
Prior to purchasing SuccessFactor’s LMS and iContent solutions, Luxottica purchased licenses directly from content providers and then directed employees to thirdparty sites to access the necessary content. Angi observes that “reporting on the training our people took meant working with many different reports from different vendors and pulling the information into spreadsheets.” Now, since iContent integrates with SuccessFactor’s LMS, all reporting is done seamlessly through SuccessFactor’s system. Luxottica can track who has acknowledged the policy documents and who hasn’t, when training has been completed, as well as tracking what training items are in employees’ learning plans.
Meeting Business-Critical Needs
In many states, unless optical stores have a licensed optician on premise, they must close their doors. “That’s why the more we can do to get and keep our people certified, the better,” says Angi. “We provide the continuing education required for licensing continuing education credits from several different third party vendors, but that’s just part of it.” Currently, each associate has to get certificates of completion mailed from individual course providers and wait for the American Board of Opticianry (ABO) to record the credit and send a certificate. “It’s a very manual, time-consuming process,” Angi says. “So we’re working with the ABO to accept electronic reporting of course completion through iContent.”
Moving Toward Blended Content
Luxottica Retail is on track to deploy the SP5 upgrade of SuccessFactor’s LMS that will allow the talent management team to incorporate survey tools and other
SuccessFactors and the SuccessFactors logo are trademarks of SuccessFactors, Inc.© 2011 SuccessFactors, Inc. All rights reserved. www.successfactors.com 1 800 809 9920
SUCCESSFACTORS /CASE STUDY
LUXOTTICA RETAIL
blended items – like supplemental online courses. “For example,” Angi offers, “instead of holding a two-day standup course, we could have it become a half-day standup course with an online component.” In the meantime, immediate plans for the future include exercising the freedom to buy more content that is highly targeted for the optical industry and to develop and deliver more custom content that meets the unique needs of Luxottica’s store associates, licensed opticians, eye doctors, lab technicians, and managements.
The Experience With SuccessFactors
Flexibility “The iContent team has been very flexible in working with us. For example, if we want training from a vendor who isn’t already an iContent partner, the iContent team will reach out to work with that vendor to get us what we need.” Turnaround “In our environment, budget cuts can happen quickly. So the longer it takes to buy courses, the more you risk not having the money to buy them. But with iContent, we have a 24-hour turnaround for purchasing and deploying courses. For example, late last December we had a department make a last-minute decision on some training for their department, and they only had money left in this years budget—money they didn’t have in next years’ budget. iContent is so agile, we were able to purchase the content they needed with this year’s budget with only about 5 fiscal days left and had it available immediately.” Streamlining “It used to be quite time-consuming to build curricula and assign it. Now we can group those assignments. We value the ability to integrate SuccessFactors with other systems to get curricula information as well as notifications.” Quality “Given that we have retail locations all over the U.S., Canada, and Puerto Rico as well as future plans to provide training to our manufacturing and wholesale locations throughout Europe and Asia, it’s great to know that when someone logs in, iContent pulls the training from a geographically close server over the Akamai network so I don’t have to worry about latency or other delays making a course run slow and frustrating my students.” Accessibility “Through iContent, associates can take training from home, from a library - from anywhere. Since it’s a hosted solution, there are no firewall issues.” ROI “Having function-specific training available on demand is huge. For example, the 85 people who take our new retail training through iContent make million-dollar purchasing decisions. So even if they learn one thing in taking this training, it could save our company millions of dollars.” 