A global automotive supplier decreases training costs by 25%

HELLA, an internationally positioned automotive supplier and a company of the Group FORVIA, experiences a rapid reduction in training efforts and costs and significantly improves data quality across their tech stack with Userlane’s Digital Adoption Platform.

The customer challenge

HELLA is a listed, internationally positioned automotive supplier operating under the umbrella brand FORVIA. Within this factual group, HELLA stands for high-performance lighting technology and automotive electronics. At the same time, the company covers a broad service and product portfolio for the spare parts and workshop business as well as for manufacturers of special vehicles with its Business Group Lifecycle Solutions. HELLA has 36,000 employees at more than 125 locations worldwide and generated consolidated sales of € 6.3 billion in the fiscal year 2021/2022.

In early 2020, HELLA introduced the SAP Portfolio and Project Management solution (SAP PPM) to automate project management processes across the organization. Taking a blended learning approach, various training methods have been applied to onboard over 4,000 users, including instructor-led training, e-learning, videos, demos, emails, support manuals, etc. Nevertheless, people were missing guidance directly in the application, and it was difficult to invest time and effort to search for support documentation during their daily work. Additionally, dealing with various user groups, it became even more evident that there was a need for a solution that would provide help to all user groups in real-time, to the extent they needed it, and when they needed it.

How we helped

Upon realizing that traditional training methods and support processes for SAP PPM were not perfectly effective, HELLA introduced Userlane’s Digital Adoption Platform to ensure better visibility of the software application’s performance and support their software users at scale by providing in-app training and real-time assistance. Userlane proved to be a powerful solution to remove these obstructions.

Allowing project transparency and better software usage

Enabling people to adopt the new central project management platform across the entire organization in the easiest way possible was one of the major priorities. Ultimately, the project team wanted to understand how people work with the software, what needs to be improved in the application, and where users might need further help. Userlane’s powerful and intuitive analytics dashboard provided all necessary insights that allowed more transparency on the project’s success and SAP PPM performance.

Improving data quality

HELLA heavily relies on data to run its business. It is essential in big-scale cross-functional projects, where various user groups are expected to understand internal workflows, enter correct data, and comply with key processes to provide accurate insights for strategic decisions. With Userlane, HELLA provided their SAP PPM users with the necessary guidance and resources to complete their tasks. Employees were able to access support content without any disruption to their workflows in the application.

Streamlining communication with employees

As with any software, SAP PPM frequently introduces new functionality and features that can impact existing processes and workflows in the system, so they need to be timely communicated to the respective user groups. Previously, HELLA’s project team and coaches would have to contact all users individually or via email to inform them about the changes and updates, resulting in insufficient resources allocation and low productivity. With Userlane Tooltips and Announcements, sharing updates, introducing new features and providing context-sensitive help became extremely easy, efficient and fast.

The results 

Helping HELLA significantly improve the employee experience with SAP PPM allowed Userlane to expand the use of its Digital Adoption Platform also in other functional areas of the group.

• 25% decrease in training efforts & costs

Training costs have decreased by 25% as there is no longer a need to create and update training manuals and other support documents or schedule instructor-led training.

• 15% reduced training time

By enabling interactive guidance, HELLA was able to significantly reduce time employees spent on instructor-led training and enable employees to learn at their own pace.

• 74% higher user engagement

With Userlane, HELLA boosted their in-app user engagement for new use cases, which in-turn significantly increased the adoption of SAP PPM application across the organization.

• 4,000 onboarded employees

Userlane helped streamline the onboarding of over 4,000 SAP PPM users worldwide.