Yaskawa is the leading global manufacturer of low and medium voltage variable frequency drives, servo systems, machine controllers, and industrial robots.

Based in Waukegan, Illinois, Yaskawa America’s Drives and Motion Division customer training program ensures that customers know how to use, program, and get the maximum value out of their Yaskawa products, ensuring they have all the information they need to become happy, loyal customers.

Yaskawa America trains around 4,000 people a year, in the field, online, and at their Illinois HQ. Since 2014, they have used a homegrown LMS to manage their learning, and while it was fit for purpose when it was initially built, the lack of automation in the LMS made it difficult for the training team to manage training at scale. At one point, they had to hire a temp to help them grade tests submitted to them by hand, and Yaskawa realized that they had outgrown this solution.

They knew that they needed an automated, self-service solution to manage learners more efficiently, without all the labor-intensive manual work. This was particularly important when it came to Yaskawa’s four engineering certification programs, all of which were previously managed across different spreadsheets and databases.

In late 2021, Yaskawa approached Thought Industries to create and implement a new learning platform to support their customer education program, and the solution went live for certified specialists in May 2022. Their Thought Industries learning platform enables Yaskawa to create targeted learning for specific learner groups, open up access to elearning, and report on important data for better insights into learner activity and behavior.

Some of the key results from Yaskawa’s work with Thought Industries include:

• More than 2x learners in just four months, going from 900 to 1,935 people
• Old style paper tests were set up in the system and are now graded and posted automatically, eliminating hours or manual grading with the previous system. More than 80 man-days of work saved in the department per year

The Challenge

Yaskawa’s previous LMS was developed in-house back in 2014, and was proving extremely labor-intensive and limiting for their growing customer training program. They needed a new LMS to help them deliver high-quality training to engineers and distributors, get more learners in the system, and to ultimately encourage product adoption from happy customers.