Ahlsell accelerates course creation by 98% and upskills thousands with Sana

Challenge

Ahlsell is a 147-year-old company with 7,500 employees, and very ambitious commercial and strategic goals. Learning and development has long been a key contributor to their success. But with millions of products that require deep technical knowledge and a business that spans eight markets, they needed a modern, scalable platform to unite its training efforts. And to leave the manual creation process and in-person training behind.

Outcome

Sana is now Ahlsell’s “House of Learning,” the central home for nearly all of the company’s ambitious training efforts. Now content creation takes one day instead of four months; it is decentralized and created autonomously by teams across markets; completion rates are up; and the company is well on its way to realizing its ambition of One Ahlsell, a united home for learning and development that houses and shares all of the company’s deep knowledge.

One single, scalable home for learning across eight markets

Ahlsell is a company with a long 147-year history, and very ambitious goals for the future—both in terms of commercial goals as well as big strategic goals, like contributing to building a more sustainable society. We have historically invested a lot in the training of our staff, and it has been a key contributor to our success.

But our ambitious learning and development agenda—product and sales training, leadership training, sustainability and code of conduct training, onboarding, procurement training, as well as aligning everyone on our culture and values—has largely been done in person and was very labor intensive. We simply couldn’t scale it.

Beyond that, we had specific challenges related to our business. In our retail operations—where we cater mostly to B2B customers with installation products, tools and machines—our products require deep technical knowledge, and we sell millions of them across our eight markets in the Nordics, Estonia and Poland. Our sales teams need to have both deep and wide knowledge of our product range.

However, the training process with our previous partner was not scalable. We had a mostly administrative learning and development system (LMS). And it was built around in-person training, which required traveling long distances and flying across the country to train in a classroom. It was time-consuming for learners, and very labor intensive on the content creation side.

A lot of the product knowledge also sits in the heads of many of our 7,500 employees, who have been with Ahlsell for years and will retire soon. Without a comprehensive knowledge-sharing process, we were afraid that all of their valuable and accumulated knowledge might be lost for the company.

Our ambition was to unite all of our learning and development efforts on one platform, offer all countries and companies within Ahlsell the same standard training, while at the same time decentralizing content creation so teams can drive their own learning agendas. We’re a decentralized organization, where each market has a lot of autonomy, and that’s important to us.

To achieve this goal, we needed a modern and engaging platform that would allow us to scale this ambitious agenda to the entire organization—and provide one central home for learning. It also needed to be easy to use, since the average sales representative within Ahlsell is not very technically savvy. After looking into about 20 options, we landed on Sana because they could deliver on all of the features we were looking for.

A hub where everyone can create engaging, high-quality content

We call Sana our “House of Learning.” It has become the headquarters for our entire learning and development efforts across the organization. We use the platform for product and sales training, leadership training, sustainability and code of conduct training, onboarding, procurement training, as well as aligning everyone on our culture and values.

It has been a complete game-changer for us in terms of how we create content for our training programs. Before we were using a mix of internal and external resources to create content—but it was expensive and time consuming. Our learning managers were spending up to four months to create content from scratch for one e-learning course.

Or we would contract a company to help us create courses. Once when I was new at Ahlsell, I asked for a proposal for a Swedish company to create a code-of-conduct training course. The price tag was almost 1 million SEK. It's too much money to make it worth it. Now with Sana, we can create courses in less than a day.

We’re creating training material at a group level that is relevant to all of the countries and companies within Ahlsell. And the platform allows us to decentralize content creation—so that subject-matter experts across our markets and departments can produce content autonomously, and set up programs they run automatically.

Commercial team members are producing sales and product training. The sustainability team is creating and running courses on AI. They are using Sana’s AI writing assistant, question generation feature, and real-time editing and collaboration to quickly create course material from scratch. They’re also using the AI assistant to turn existing content, like PDFs, into courses in minutes.

Now I can assign one person to create a course in one day using Sana’s AI tools, quickly translate it for every market, and then proofread the translation. So we’re not just saving a huge amount of money, we’re also saving a tremendous amount of time. We can be much quicker than we ever have been before, and we now have a scalable solution.

We’re implementing this approach across the company, and in each of our markets. Each country is in the process of building scalable learning journeys, adapting relevant courses or creating new ones in the local language or that meet the needs of that specific market. For example, the Norwegian market created a new training initiative in sales that was translated into Swedish, so the Swedish market could use it right away with little effort.

We’re also using teamspaces, which allows us to organize content and grant permissions to different team members to share the content and collaborate on it.

Going from 60% to 98% completion rate for company-wide training

“One Ahlsell” is what we call our entire learning and development agenda. And the goal is to make sure we have a common corporate culture and an efficient organization. To achieve that, all employees need to take the same courses, learn the same principles, go through the same onboarding process, and understand our vision for sustainability. For example, Norway shouldn’t have different sustainability training than Finland.

We use Sana’s course editions feature for a lot of these group-level trainings. It allows us to offer one central training program, no matter the market or the language. For the learner, they get to access the course in their preferred language. And on the admin side, we can get full reporting on the program across the markets and languages in one place—rather than having individual programs for each market, and having to manually compare the results.

All of this plus the interactivity of the platform and ease of use also means that we’ve seen completion rates go up on these more “standard” company-wide courses. Previously, when we didn’t work in a digital way, we had our staff go through code-of-conduct training, and we had a 60-70% completion rate. When we ran the course in Sana for the first time, we saw that number go up to 98%.

For me, this is great because now I don’t have to hunt people to get them to go through the training. We track and set goals on the number of training hours being done for auditing and reporting purposes. It makes me happy and proud to be able to report those kinds of numbers to the board.

Streamlining onboarding and supporting product managers for the future

Apart from sales, procurement is one of the core tenets of our business at Ahlsell. We sell millions of highly technical products to professionals—products related to water and sewage, heating and sanitation, ventilation, insulation, electricity, refrigeration, tools and machinery and more.

The onboarding and skilling-up process for new product managers working with procurement has traditionally been dependent on each manager. That made the process manual, local and inconsistent when it came to the quality of the training. We want to be able to onboard them faster, and make sure they get the support they need to do their job well, like increasing their capabilities.

This is an important strategic project for us internally. And it’s vital for us when it comes to becoming even more sustainable, and building a more sustainable society. Aside from working toward the goal of sustainability throughout the supply chain, we offer products and expertise to, say, maintain a stable electricity grid or build a complete water supply and wastewater treatment for small and large plants. It’s our procurement product managers that need to have this expertise, and be able to share it with our customers.

Our ambition is to build out an internal one-stop-shop for procurement within Sana that is scalable and accessible. We’re starting by leveraging Sana’s AI editing and writing features to repurpose existing content and make it more interactive. Then we’ll create new courses and materials, and scale it across all countries and all of our product managers. That way, our product managers get trained with the right knowledge, and they can use the search feature to find whatever answers they need.

Giving leaders the soft and hard skills they need for the future, at scale

One of our biggest strategic initiatives is a Future-Ready Leadership program for all 800 leaders at Ahlsell. We’re working with an external supplier that is building all of the course content in Sana, and mixing both self-paced course content with sessions in Sana’s interactive virtual classroom, Sana Live.

We are using these live sessions for our workshops on self-leadership, group leadership and feedback. And we also use it for peer-coaching sessions. It’s making the training so much more interactive and engaging than what we could have achieved before with our old solution.

We just had our first group of 180 leaders graduate from the program—all from different countries. And we will scale this to all of the leaders in Ahlsell, which for a decentralized organization like ours, is something we’ve never done before.

The next step will be Future-Ready Employees. This program is our big bet for the future because we have a lot of employees, who have been at Ahlsell for a long time. Their job and their KPIs will be the same, but the program will teach them how to leverage new technology and make sure they’re ready for that opportunity.

Making Sana the single source of truth for all knowledge at Ahlsell

Our partnership with Sana is just getting started. And as we progress on this journey, the speed with which Sana is developing and improving features for us is more and more impressive and important for us.

Sana is also supporting this informal community between customers and embracing co-creation. I’ve gotten to be a part of a community with other customers, and together we’re making the product better. We also get to learn and share experiences in a way that benefits each other. This is an amazing way to work together.

My ambition for the future is to make Sana the central and comprehensive knowledge hub within Ahlsell. It’s on the horizon for me.

We have big initiatives coming up with Sana that will integrate our suppliers into the learning process to make it more efficient. It’s a huge business opportunity to establish a knowledge base for our sales representatives across product categories. Instead of working in silos in each specialist area as they’ve historically done, we’ll be able to improve cross-selling of products across categories, and offer a better sales experience for our customers. This has the potential to have a huge impact. And now with Sana, we have the opportunity to scale that training—and all of our training efforts—across markets and languages very easily.

We’re not only on track to make Sana the single source of truth at Ahlsell and the home of all learning and development, but we’re taking big leaps towards meeting our biggest goals. Having the opportunity to work with Sana, and to create this environment where people share their knowledge makes me extremely happy and proud.