BOC Group Case Study: Creating cost effective e-learning

Global gases giant BOC Group create self-authored e-learning

Global gases giant BOC Group has been using e-learning for about eight years, mainly to give sales staff the technical product knowledge they need to understand their customers’ requirements.

Until a few years ago, it had used a specialist consultancy to create bespoke courses that included plenty of video, Flash and other specialist techniques. These courses looked great but took a long time to produce and were very costly. That was fine for training in areas of the business that didn't alter much, but not cost effective for more short-term training goals.

It was a chance encounter that put BOC global knowledge manager Derrick Hilton onto the idea of self-authored e-learning. "I heard a training services guy from Cisco Systems explain how, every Thursday lunchtime, they'd have a number of product developers be interviewed for half an hour to update people. I thought that I could take that approach with sales training for a particular product," says Hilton. "We decided to use BILD to create the interactive discussion. I interviewed a colleague who was experienced on this topic and then the appropriate parts of the manual were added to the training. It was very simple, very quick. It took just four or five days in total. It was a bit rough, a bit ready, but it worked."

When another, much larger project came up to launch a new set of fuel gas equipment into South America and Canada, BILD again seemed like the ideal solution. "Everything was self-authored and written in Word to begin with and then sent out be translated," says Hilton. That meant it was first time BOC could simultaneously launch in French, Spanish and English, and the whole project - involving 150 pages of technical information - took just four or five weeks to complete.

The results looked great and the training was much more effective than using PowerPoint, which had also been suggested as a solution. But, as Hilton points out: "That would have required three separate courses, and with the size of the files in PowerPoint it could make the running very slow."

Using BILD also meant that it's easy to centrally make any minor changes or additions.

"Because we can do a lot internally, it becomes cost-effective enough for lots of different areas," adds Hilton. "My firm belief is I will go on to utilise this - I would now struggle to justify the bespoke costs."

Self-authoring tools offer an alternative to expensive custom-made content, but in the wrong hands they can do more harm than good.

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