Greatly Improving Staff Productivity and Reducing Training Costs by $150,000

Background

A leading Australian steel manufacturer needed an updated and cost effective training video to train new starters and to refresh current staff on their Isolation systems.

It was important to train maintenance staff, in order to ensure the Plant was always running smoothly.

Before the videos were introduced, the following problems were found when training new staff.

• Inconsistent training. This was because several facilitators were used with different approaches, resulting in confused new starters when applying the procedures.
• Long training time required. The original training pack consisted of 226 PowerPoint pages and involved a four hour classroom session.

Here’s how we solved their problems:

1. Using our Digicast Training Methodology, we converted the large training manuals into a friendly, conversational script in easy to understand English. The safety committee approved the script.
2. During filming, care was taken to ensure that every single learning message was shot from a variety of angles to make comprehension clear (and to make the training video more interesting).
3. While with the edit, we paid extra attention to making sure that the all of the training messages were clear and could be understood by a school student. Titles were added to increase message comprehension and retention.

And here’s what happened:

1. The steel company has estimated a conservative saving of $30,000 per year on their training costs or $150,000 over the five year life of the training videos. This was achieved by:
   • Removing the need for an external training facilitator.
   • Providing flexible training resulting in no more training being done during overtime.
   • Reducing training time from four hours to less than one hour.
2. An immediate improvement was found in new inductees understanding the training information. This was achieved by:
   • Consistent training – the previous three training facilitators were training new inductees differently resulting in confusion.
   • No more gaps in knowledge – workers now quickly learn the right way to undertake their procedures, as the mystery behind the systems has been removed.
   • Reduction in the number of incidents – staff incidents are now caused from lack of inattention rather than non standard ways of performing a task.

In addition to this, Digicast Productions was awarded the LearnX Asia Pacific 2008 Award for ‘Best Use of Video in a Training Program" for the work we undertook for these induction videos.