Litmos Helps SouthernCarlson Equip and Empower Employees Through Learning

Industry: Manufacturing, Construction, and Distribution
Use Case: Internal Training, Employee Training, Sales Training, Compliance Training, Professional Development
Litmos Solutions: Litmos LMS, Litmos Training Content, Litmos Content Authoring Tool
Customer Since: 2022

Founded in 1947, SouthernCarlson is a leading distributor of construction and industrial supplies built on a foundation of service and commitment to the customer.

With a mission to provide fanatical service and fast delivery, SouthernCarlson’s goal for learning and training is to empower their employees to fulfill their mission.

To accomplish this goal, they turned to Litmos.

Learning before Litmos

Prior to their Litmos implementation, SouthernCarlson exclusively relied on “on the job” training. This resulted in inconsistent messaging, lack of accountability, fluctuating quality of training experience, and overall employee dissatisfaction.

With over 1,500 employees across the U.S. and Mexico, in 140+ locations, their continued growth was magnifying the training challenges, especially since a portion of employees are deskless.

Recognizing these challenges, SouthernCarlson defined their business goals for training. “To provide resources across the organization to equip and empower employees to do their jobs to the best of their abilities. We want to drive engagement and decrease attrition, as well as offer development opportunities to our employees,” Kristi Kimbril, Director of Training.

“We desperately needed training as a whole but also a user-friendly platform for our team members, as well as traceability. I think the overall training impact has been a tremendous positive impact to the organization, keeping our team safer, better informed, and more educated.” – Rob Waterman, Executive Vice President of Operations

How does SouthernCarlson use Litmos day to day?

SouthernCarlson’s implementation of Litmos currently supports 1,650+ learners and 7 admins across North America. With language diversity amongst their learners, SouthernCarlson currently offers learning in English and Spanish, with the potential for courses to be offered in Japanese in the future.

Why did SouthernCarlson choose Litmos as their learning solution? Kristi Kimbril, Director of Training replied “we chose Litmos due to the ease of usage, quick deployment, content library, and best value that we could find. I had deployed Litmos at a previous company and I knew the product would meet our needs and grow with us.”

Litmos’ automation capabilities provide SouthernCarlson the ability to set up over 400+ assignment rules based on the variety of roles and locations within the organization. “We have been able to automate the process, saving an unquantifiable amount of time in the long run,” notes Kimbril, saving SouthernCarlson valuable resources.

With many locations, SouthernCarlson needed a learning solution that could easily organize their employees, locations, and corporate hierarchy. The Litmos Teams feature provided the ability to build out a comprehensive organizational chart, allowing visibility to their employees of who works where. “Since we have so many locations/employees this line of site has been unbelievably valuable to our leaders. In addition, we had some organizational changes, and it was quite simple to move the teams around to the new reporting structures,” states Kimbril.

Another important part of the learning program at Southern Carlson is sales training. The Litmos app has been a popular feature with sales reps and sales leaders as they are on the go often and the app makes training more accessible to all.

“The SouthernCarlson Academy tool has been one of the best training apps I have ever seen! Kristi and her team have done a great job putting this together getting us a valuable tool to improve performance. One of the best improvements I’ve seen is in communication with all employees. The ability to manage, train and document important safety, HR and other workplace issues in a timely manner has been a big win. Customizing training and marketing has worked well for us” – Kent Philips, National Director – Multifamily

While SouthernCarlson is heavily utilizing some of the advanced features of Litmos, they note that one of their biggest advantages has been the ease of use. “We have such positive feedback from our employees who were not hired to work on computers. They find it easy to navigate and simple to use,” says Kimbril.

How SouthernCarlson is utilizing Litmos Content & Content Authoring Tool

To equip and empower their employees with the best learning content, SouthernCarlson turns to the Litmos Content Authoring Tool within the Litmos LMS, and Litmos Training Content.

SouthernCarlson creates new courses each month, which could be taxing for a learning team of only a few admins, but Kimbril explains that “the content author is an easy-to-use tool that speeds up the process of content creation. It has a short learning curve, allowing us to get started almost immediately. The variety of choices within the content author allow us to diversify the look and feel of the training, leading to more interest.”

Even with the Litmos Content Authoring Tool being easy to use, the SouthernCarlson team decided to take full advantage of the Litmos Training Content. The prebuilt content helped the team to get their Litmos solutions live in only two months.

“I thought they [the courses] were interesting because a lot of them use real-world examples.” – Cameron O’Brian, Sales Support – MF, Eastern Division Charlotte

With the addition of the Litmos Training Content, Kimbril and her team were able to release their programs with robust professional development, compliance, safety, diversity, and hundreds of other courses their learners could benefit from right away. When asked about the time saved by utilizing the Litmos courses Kimbril answered, “unquantifiable, we would not be able to provide the content that is available to our employees without the content library. We rely on the developmental team at Litmos to produce high quality training courses each month, so that we can focus on developing our unique to SouthernCarlson courses.”

“You can search for courses that you may not have a good grip on – like Excel. If you get stuck, you can go to the Academy and search for something, and it could probably help you.” – Michelle Hajdu, Sales Support Manager, RG29 Cleveland

Results with Litmos Solutions

Since implementing Litmos in December of 2022, SouthernCarlson has documented significant improvement in their learner engagement and compliance rates. “For the first time we are providing standardized training content and tools across all locations and teams, even our deskless employee base. Separately, we have the ability to be proactive with our compliance training,” says Kimbril.

Since December 1st, 2022, over 34,000 courses have been taken and over 1,300 employees a month are logging in to take courses. Tracking these employees has been made easier by integrating their Active Directory with their Litmos LMS.

In addition to quantifiable results, Kimbril explains how their culture has been positively impacted by the introduction of Litmos into their business. “We receive a lot of positive feedback about the value that SouthernCarlson Academy is adding to our organization. It has opened our eyes to the way that we can communicate and the messages that we want to deliver. People who have worked here a long time say they are excited about the future and how the company is investing in them,” explains Kimbril.