Why OEMs Need a Specialized LMS to Train Their Extended Enterprise

If you’re an original equipment manufacturer (OEM), there’s one big question you’re constantly asking: How can two dealerships selling the same cars guarantee that their technicians can provide the same quality of service on a given vehicle?

In the world of learning management, extended enterprises are one of the most complex business models to train. While OEMs like yours make the goods, you rely on dealerships and franchises to sell and service them. You may have even more third parties involved in the business process.

Your extended enterprise needs to be sure that the people in their network have the skills and the training courses they need. You also need to have complete visibility and control over that training. Properly staffing the entire system, from your OEM to level one technicians, depends on quality training.

What is Extended Enterprise Training?

Many roles in the extended enterprise system require specialized training, but ownership is usually spread out, making coordination a real challenge. How do you ensure that all of your partners’ employees are providing the quality of sales and service that your brand demands?

The answer is a learning management system (LMS) that understands these challenges and is built around them. For the past 20 years, LatitudeLearning has been the go-to partner for extended enterprises to make LMS solutions designed specially for their business model.

Let’s take a look at the unique training needs of extended enterprises and how LatitudeLearning’s LMS is designed to meet them.

What Are the Unique Needs of Extended Enterprise Training?

Training for extended enterprises is a different beast than for a more traditional business model. First and foremost, extended enterprises face the challenge of training across a diverse organizational structure. The vast majority of the network is made up of people who don’t work for them — and that’s not a simple issue to address.

While every business deals with employee turnover, it’s much harder to ensure that every dealership has the knowledge base they need when you don’t have control over staffing. Even if the dealership is properly staffed, you probably don’t know whether or not the service that employees provide is meeting your expectations.

Training programs for the extended enterprise must also account for vast differences in training needs across roles and levels. Extended enterprises have different groups of people making, selling, and servicing their products. Each of those groups needs specialized training delivered to them.

Training each individual or group in the enterprise means giving the employees the exact skills they need to play their role as a small cog in a much larger machine. This is much different from a typical corporate model, where training may be nearly identical for every employee. In the extended enterprise, that type of training overlap between roles is few and far between.

To put a finer point on these problems, training in the extended enterprise must zero in on highly individuated roles, like a Level 1 brake technician at a car company. That’s a very specific job, and the worker needs distinct skills and courses to be successful. Beyond that specific job, the enterprise could also create Level 2, Level 3, and Master roles.

Each of these levels comes with further advanced training, which must be delivered on a training path that’s distinct from other types of technicians. Additionally, if brake technology were to evolve, the training would have to adapt so that every brake technician in the extended enterprise can be reskilled.

And we’re just scratching the surface.

How Does a Traditional LMS Provide Training in the Extended Enterprise?

Some quick background. The learning management industry primarily started as an HR function, so the traditional LMS is typically geared towards tasks like onboarding and delivering the same training for every employee.

The benefit of this is that you can guarantee that a universal standard is created, which hopefully means that everyone has the same core knowledge base. However, this usually isn’t a priority for extended enterprises, which need personalized training to build the skills their employees need most.

In many cases, traditional LMSs have to make major accommodations as a result. The OEMs also have to alter the way they do business, most often by simplifying their training. Unfortunately, simplifying critical training means more mistakes will be made by well-meaning (but under-trained) employees.

Some of our own extended enterprise partners have struggled in the past with traditional LMS solutions. One in particular was forced to modify every part of their training program to make it fit with the LMS.

It was nearly impossible for this extended enterprise to collect data of any value on the results of their training program. Employees were required to take a certain volume of courses, but that standard wasn’t personalized for individual roles. Employees were even taking training they didn’t need for their job function just to meet the volume standard.

By the time the OEM came to LatitudeLearning, the extended enterprise had dumbed down their training program so much, they were struggling to accomplish their originally intended training objectives. The delivery and design would have worked just fine for a company focused on HR functions, but for the extended enterprise, a traditional LMS solution just doesn’t work.

How LatitudeLearning Bridges the Gap Between LMS Solutions and Extended Enterprises

Twenty years ago, LatitudeLearning was a tech consulting group for OEMs. Around that time, one of our clients asked us to come and rescue their failing LMS system. They weren’t willing to modify and truncate their training programs, so we partnered with them to modify the LMS to provide the training complexity they needed.

At the time, we approached it as another consulting gig. But throughout the engagement, we realized that this was a real problem that many other OEMs faced. Standard LMS platforms had a real shortcoming, because they were unable to support such advanced, specialized needs.

Fast forward to today, we now fully focus on creating LMS solutions that meet the complex training needs of OEMs in the extended enterprise.

To put it simply, an extended enterprise LMS should adapt to the business, rather than the business trying to fit into an uncomfortable LMS. We are unique in our ability to accomplish this, because creating custom training paths is something that we do natively in our LMS.

For example, you can have an employee come in as an entry level technician, and our LMS will meet them right where they’re at. They know exactly what they have to start with, and they are automatically assigned the next levels as time goes on or new technology is introduced.

That’s how LatitudeLearning allows our customers to fully own their LMS, without sacrificing their business model or the quality of training. Our partners model the paths, define the skills, and then let the LMS naturally move people through that progression. 

On top of that, our LMS can still tackle the HR side of learning management.

Test Drive Latitude’s LMS for Free Today

We believe in helping extended enterprises deliver value-driven, impactful training programs. Ultimately, the way you drive value is to make sure that your network is performing at its optimal level with the right amount of training.

LatitudeLearning ensures this is possible by providing the delivery and the performance metrics you need to look holistically at your training program. Our partners have described implementing our LMS as putting on an old shoe, simply because we understand the needs of extended enterprises and deliver them.

See for yourself just how easy training delivery could be for your extended enterprise. Start by test driving our LMS for free today.