Today, Hunter Douglas is the world market leader in window coverings and a major manufacturer of architectural products. The Group employs some 18,000 people worldwide and is comprised of 166 companies with 65 manufacturing and 101 assembly operations and marketing organizations in over 100 countries. In North America, the company sells through 21 fabricators, who take and fulfill orders from dealers.

Hunter Douglas’s leadership position flows from continuous innovation within its business — and these innovations come from its people. Not surprisingly, the company greatly values its human capital assets and has developed multilevel training programs for its fabricators, employees, retail dealers, installers and professional designers.

In addition to sales and product training, Hunter Douglas offers self-improvement, leadership and training at facilities such as the Hunter Douglas University in Broomfield, Colorado, USA and the Corporate University in New Jersey.

Given its strong organizational and leadership commitment to education, it’s no surprise that Hunter Douglas has embraced e-learning.

Technology-based learning and Hunter Douglas

Hunter Douglas began its online learning initiatives in 2004 with an internally-developed learning management system (LMS) that delivered product and business training to about 1,200 learners from the company’s North American fabricators including 800 sales and customer service representatives.

Called the Fabricator Sales Institute, the system was a success. As demand grew, Hunter Douglas decided to upgrade its LMS to the NetDimensions Enterprise Knowledge Platform (EKP) with an initial 3,000-user license. EKP was rolled out to fabricators, although the LMS change wasn’t immediately apparent to users. At first, Hunter Douglas kept the original Fabricator Sales Institute as the user-facing front-end while all the back-end processes were handled by EKP.

The Fabricator Sales Institute, after the technology change to EKP, delivered more than 40,000 training hours. At any given time, the system handled from 20 to 50 concurrent users, each of whom was spending an average of 2.1 hours per training per session.

Finally, Hunter Douglas re-implemented the allnew Hunter Douglas Learning Center fully utilizing EKP.

When the new Hunter Douglas Learning Center was unveiled, the system soon began delivering training at a rate exceeding 5,000 hours per month and often reached 100 concurrent users. The Hunter Douglas Learning Center quietly opened up to Dealers and training soon exceeded 7,000 hours and concurrent usage reached 155. More remarkably, the Hunter Douglas Learning Center was becoming a success without any fanfare, zero publicity and no internal promotion.

An ambitious future for the Hunter Douglas Learning Center

Hunter Douglas is in the process of launching its new Learning Center to over 7,000 Aligned Dealers (15,000 learners), 2,500 Certified Installers and additional internal employees from all over the globe. At the first Hunter Douglas International Alliance Conference in Denver, Colorado, e-learning was introduced to over 4,000 attending fabricators, dealers and installers from around the globe.

The EKP-powered Hunter Douglas Learning Center will, over time, play a key role in delivering product, sales, safety, compliance, leadership, personal productivity and other training in the form of online, offline, books, on-the-job, videobased and instructor-led training programs.

With EKP, Hunter Douglas Dealers can participate in the new Professional Dealer Program that allows dealers to receive a Hunter Douglas Certification, then regularly re-certify themselves each year. Users can even tap EKP for book-based training (they can go directly from the system to Amazon.com to buy the books) and online assessments. Hunter Douglas can depend on EKP to schedule and deliver training not only in staffed facilities such as the Hunter Douglas University in Broomfield, Colorado, and the Corporate University in New Jersey, but also in smaller facilities that don’t have dedicated personnel to attend to learners’ needs and for scheduling their many traveling seminars.

Hunter Douglas expects to have all their North American employees in the system within two years and be serving the needs of some 30,000 individual global users by 2011 (needless to say, Hunter Douglas keeps upgrading EKP).

Accounting for success

Several elements account for the success of the Hunter Douglas Learning Center. These elements include:

• Support for education from senior management making the development of e-learning easy.
• User input from two Training Improvement Advisory Councils.
• An organizational culture that supports continuous blended learning including classroom, train the trainer, on the job, traveling seminars and of course e-learning.

The future looks bright

Hunter Douglas is looking even further down the road to implementations in different languages. The e-learning team already has requests for Spanish support from a couple of the North American operations and the benefits of the Hunter Douglas Learning Center are being extended across the Atlantic to Asia, Australia and South America.

With EKP’s multilingual support — users can select preferred languages so that one user can have an English display while his neighbor interacts with the system in French or any of the 27 languages and dialects currently supported — and with the system’s flexibility, different company divisions can have their own unique interfaces, plus the availability of courseware in different languages (including content from Hunter Douglas general courseware supplier SkillSoft) combine to give the Hunter Douglas Learning Center a powerful advantage.

EKP’s ability to link to other enterprise systems (the e-learning team has already interfaced EKP with Hunter Douglas’ CRM system, Onyx and is currently working on integration with their HR System) is key in maintaining data. In the future EKP will also have the ability to plug into Hunter Douglas’s SAP system to retrieve sales histories and other business critical information.

The ability to selectively roll out functions (reports that were selectively delivered to channels, training managers and sales representatives after testing to ensure ease of use) have also proven handy.

The Hunter Douglas e-learning team has extended the capabilities of the Learning Center platform through their ongoing partnership with NetDimensions. As Carrie Milkis, LMS Manager, notes, “NetDimensions was chosen not only because the company offered an LMS with the flexibility and power to meet Hunter Douglas’s immediate needs, but also because NetDimensions is flexible and willing to work with Hunter Douglas – and because, like Hunter Douglas, NetDimensions is itself a global company”.

As proof of the power of partnership, the Hunter Douglas e-learning team has worked with NetDimensions on numerous proposed enhancements including platform support for elective class options, a feature that proved critical for Hunter Douglas’ certification programs that NetDimensions later built into a general release.

The future of learning does look bright at Hunter Douglas. Given the company’s innovative environment, belief in continuous education and management support for employee and partner development, there will never be a shortage of subject matter for training – nor any shortage of demand for education that improves the business.