LIVEPLACE - A Trusted Partner

Konica Minolta were seeking a solution to enable them to provide blended learning and initially approached LIVEPLACE, a trusted Saba Partner since 1999, to advise them on how this could be achieved. After a rigorous selection procedure, Konica Minolta chose Saba Centra. Saba Centra is a leading web-conferencing solution for enterprise learning and collaboration, enabling globally dispersed employees, customers and partners to learn, interact, and exchange knowledge online in real time. The solution is delivered behind the firewall and supported by LIVEPLACE.

Konica Minolta Academy

The success of Konica Minolta Business Solutions relies heavily on employees completing the necessary mandatory certifications, as well as acquiring excellent customer project-management skills. With this in mind, the Konica Minolta Academy created a training curriculum to provide certification and project management training to over 150 employees based in 25 offices around Europe. The Academy provides blended-learning courses integrated with Saba Centra virtual classroom training. The Academy offers various levels of the internationally accredited PRINCE2TM curriculum.

PRINCE2™ (PRojects IN Controlled Environments) is a universally accepted, process-based approach for project management, providing an easily tailored and scalable project-management methodology for the management of all types of projects.

The PRINCE2™ courses available from the Academy currently comprise a Foundation certification, and a blended curriculum for PRINCE2™ Practitioner level is currently being tested within a pilot group. Previously, the PRINCE™ training was held over three onsite training days. However, now the PRINCE2™ Foundation course requires between twenty and forty hours self-study over a twelve-week period, depending on the individual participant's level of English. This provides a more flexible training solution for the participant and a more cost-efficient delivery method for Konica Minolta.

The use of Saba Centra is an essential component in the certification training programmes, which are generally designed as self-study courses. Alexander Pakulat, Team Manager of eLearning at Konica Minolta Academy, explains, "Long-term courses that use web-based training sessions are very rarely successful unless they also have tutor-based support. The kick-off phase of the PRINCE2™ training, where participants initially meet face to face and then subsequently in virtual group meetings, gives participants the feeling of being part of a learning group spanning the whole of Europe. This increases employee motivation."

Pakulat went on to say, "Saba Centra also allows participants to contact industry experts at our company headquarters to discuss training milestones in person, and this contributes significantly to the success of the training course. Furthermore, it is not financially viable to deliver a centralised onsite training initiative for employees based across Europe, which also has significant operational challenges."

In addition to the basic meeting functions provided by Saba Centra, Konica Minolta particularly values the wide range of application-sharing functions that they use to show participants the online self-study components of the PRINCE2™ training. The survey function in Saba Centra is used to check the participants' knowledge retention.



"The webinars ultimately make it possible for participants to follow the training initiative as a self-study course", adds Pakulat. "A twelve-week certification process is more flexible and tailored individually to each participant, as the knowledge gained during the training sessions can be transferred to participants' everyday work on a continuous basis - it is much harder to transfer this knowledge in one go after a three-day seminar".



The Future

As well as the Konica Minolta Academy, Konica Minolta also uses Saba Centra in other parts of the business. Saba Centra is an essential tool used for conducting internal business meetings. It also plays a vital role in SAP software upgrades. SAP users are quickly shown the new software functionality using Saba Centra, ensuring faster knowledge transfer and improved software usage.