The Virtual Forge was selected by Ford of Europe to deliver a new Learning Management System (LMS) that improved the training experience for its workforce and was more effective and transparent for the business. Our challenge was to deliver a LMS that was user friendly, responsive across all devices and had the ability to scale, all without disrupting existing training taking place across more than 7.000 dealers in Europe.
The story of Ford Motor Company begins in 1863, with Henry Ford realising his dream of producing an automobile that was reasonably priced, reliable, and efficient with the introduction of the Model T in 1908. Ford has a rich heritage, and is the world's fifth largest automotive company based on worldwide vehicle sales. They needed a technology partner to deliver a new bespoke LMS that personalised training, with new functionality, and a more engaging user interface than their existing system.
Ford asked us to tender for their new LMS, requiring a system that was user-friendly, intuitive, built on data and extremely robust. They also wanted to improve their reporting mechanisms, adding improved ways to visualise their training data, such as dashboards, KPIs, advanced filtering, and customisation.
says Ivo Rodrigues, The Virtual Forge’s CTO, who led the The Virtual Forge team to develop the solution,
With over 50,000 users accessing the legacy system, they needed to transition smoothly to the new platform, on a market by market basis, with the knowledge that any downtime would be minimal.
The goals were to enhance the old system that was thought to be overly complex, uninspiring and generally out-of-date with modern UI and UX standards. The Virtual Forge development team worked alongside Ford to design an AWS cloud based infrastructure architecture that allows thousands of users to quickly access the learning content they require, with the benefit of a cost-effective way of scaling the infrastructure based on system load.
The success of the project was going to be judged on:
The Virtual Forge has been an Amazon Web Services (AWS) partner for 7 years, with extensive knowledge of their hosting services and ecosystem. The system is hosted on AWS, with all the benefits of hosting in the cloud, including cost, reliability, scalability and availability.
We had a lot of previous knowledge building LMS based solutions, so taking that into consideration, we decided that the best approach would be to use a micro service oriented architecture where we would basically divide and conquer.
says Ivo Rodrigues, CTO of The Virtual Forge.
Each microservice is implemented as a .NET application, and all microservices are shielded behind one API gateway.
The platform’s frontend is divided into two distinct React applications. The first one being the Admin Area, where system administrators can manage all the aspects of the LMS, such as, online learning courses, classrooms, webinars, assessments, certifications, users, dealers, and others. The second React application is a learning portal that students can access to take their learning, progress with their certifications, see lists of mandatory learning, see their course library, and other student specific functionalities. Managers also use the learning portal to manage their team (e.g. enrolling students or check their learning history).
For the reports, we used AWS Quicksight. We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, so we used Quicksight’s capabilities to implement a set of custom made reports, that feed data from a reporting database, that is a real-time replica of the operational databases. We integrated the AWS Quicksight reports into the Learning Portal, so users can easily access the reports they have access to.
Nothing at Ford happens independently, so working with their stakeholders and the 18 key European markets was crucial to the project's success.
A preliminary analysis of the old learning platform was the first step, the 18 markets were surveyed and asked how they used the existing platform, what worked well for them, what needed improving and what features they would like to see. The Virtual Forge used a design-led approach to develop an early prototype delivered in Adobe XD, based on the brief of “modern, simple and intuitive design”. The Virtual Forge has been an Adobe partner for 10 years.
As an Adobe partner, The Virtual Forge uses the prototyping features that Adobe XD has to create eye-catching wireframes that resemble as closely as possible the platform we were scoping. This was very important to the success of the project as having a visual prototype engaged the markets, as users could see the proposed solution for themselves, understand how it would look and how it would behave. It also meant that Ford only committed to extensive development work once all feedback had been obtained.
Some screens from the prototypes can be seen here:
The central Ford team took the prototype to 5 markets and ran 2-3 day workshops. Activities included carrying out tasks on the existing LMS and the new prototype, timing these and analysing the time savings, as well as gathering qualitative feedback.
The results from the user testing can be seen below:
Throughout the project all the markets were updated via monthly meetings and regular email communications. They were shown project timings and knew when feedback windows were. The project timeline was very transparent so all markets knew what was going on and when it was happening. This contributed to the team environment that Ford always wanted, and created a very trustworthy and diverse environment where everyone felt part of the team.
The project was delivered on time and on budget! The benefits since developing the new LMS have been widely felt, including:
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