Adobe Success Story

Safety-Kleen Systems, Inc., is the leading parts cleaner, industrial waste management and oil recycling and re-refining company in North America, with approximately 5,000 employees in 200 service and recycling centers across the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico..The company’s Professional Training Group is responsible for developing and distributing internal training on software and technology to employees.

Challenge

The Professional Training Group at Safety-Kleen is engaged in a transition from traditional training methods to an eLearning format. The process requires finding and deploying the best eLearning technology available. Frank Hanfland, the group’s Technical Training Manager, discovered Macromedia Captivate (formerly Macromedia RoboDemo) at an eLearning conference and quickly recognized the tremendous advantages it could offer his program.

Solution

Macromedia Captivate (formerly Macromedia RoboDemo)

Benefits

• Reduced training development costs by $600,000
• Generated a five-fold increase in eLearning course production
• Projects completed in minutes that previously took entire day
• Product paid for itself within hours of use
• Eliminated reliance on graphics and web professionals and outsourcing

Project Details

Frank Hanfland, Technical Training Manager of the Professional Training Group at Safety-Kleen, has spent the last ten years at the forefront of multimedia and eLearning technology.

“The traditional method for software training is to build simulations by hand,” says Hanfland. “You take a screen shot, edit it in a graphics program, overlay menus, and so on. It took about a day for a good programmer to build one minute of interaction.”

Hanfland experimented with creating simulations with screen recording tools, but was left unsatisfied. “The file size is huge, plus you can’t edit them at all; end of story.”

Soon after Safety-Kleen charged him with overhauling the company’s training infrastructure, Hanfland discovered Macromedia Captivate (then called RoboDemo) at an eLearning conference.

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Captivate screenshot of Safety-Kleen's SAP training.

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“I was very impressed with the file size. A one-minute demonstration was only 100K, which is tiny,” say Hanfland. “So I installed it on my office computer and started using it. Within minutes I had completed a screen simulation that would have required a day using traditional methods.”

Hanfland’s return on investment was remarkable. “Within the first few hours of having bought it, we had already recouped our investment. It is amazing how fast you can develop things, and the ease of editing is just tremendous.”

The learning curve was almost zero. Hanfland reports that he mastered most of the software’s features after a single day of use. He subsequently trained a colleague (they currently have 3 full time employees in their professional training group), who began creating fully interactive eLearning simulations after just two days, without requiring any Flash programming or graphic arts skills whatsoever.

Although most of the training Hanfland creates is on Safety-Kleen’s SAP system, he has discovered that Captivate is invaluable for an array of less formal tasks.

“When we changed email providers, everyone had to set their Microsoft Outlook to a different plan. The reconfiguring wasn’t a big deal, but we had to show 4,500 employees how to do it. To do a training piece, you’d start with, ‘Where’s my graphic designer, where’s my web programmer?’ With Captivate, it’s a one man show. I created a training simulation and put it online in less than two hours.”

Hanfland credits Captivate with a cascade of production and efficiency improvements that have dramatically enhanced his department’s impact on the bottom line.

“Before Captivate, we produced one course per month. Now we do four or five per month. As far as development costs go, we no longer have to go to outside companies. We have this year reduced our training development costs by $600,000, yet increased production five times.”

The organization-wide impact is even more impressive: “By converting the organization to an eLearning organization, we are able to reduce the time to market of a new employee by 40 percent. Because they are trained faster and ready to earn revenue sooner, this has saved us more than $1.2 million dollars in 2004. We’re projecting a net return of $3.75 million for 2005.”

Hanfland notes that the latest release of Macromedia Captivate is the most impressive to date. “The greatest feature is the timeline. You now have detailed control, while preserving the ease of use for simple projects. The recording and narration also works very well. A fully-edited animation with audio used to take around four hours. With the improved audio functionality, now it takes only two.”

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