Totara E-learning Case Study: Arriva

Delivering an award-winning, company-wide learning solution with Totara Learn

Arriva adopted Totara Learn as their enterprise Learning Managing System, branded Arriva Learning, and has expanded up to 25,000 licences. Initially purchased to support the adoption of SAP ERP systems, the platform is now widely used across Arriva’s various business functions and divisions, with nearly 24,000 learners, and has become an integral enterprise-wide service.

Arriva chose Hubken Group to deliver, host and support this service because of their extensive product and e-learning knowledge, the open and honest approach they have with their clients, and the incredible level of support they have provided over the years.

This partnership, with a heavy focus on delivering compliance training, resulted in Arriva receiving a coveted Brandon Hall Group Silver Award in 2024, following on from winning Totara's 2023 Best Compliance Experience Award.

Customer: Arriva
Industry: Transport
Location: UK
Solution: Totara
Additional Resources: Case Study Overview PDF

“I would recommend Hubken for their partnership approach, know-how, and focus on value for Arriva. Their understanding of our needs has augmented our own skills to help drive adoption and rollout.”

Arriva

Lee Mulvaney, Head of Enterprise Services

The challenge

Arriva approached Hubken Group in 2017, initially to provide a coherent learning platform for their SAP training programme. This platform has now grown to be able to integrate and deliver Arriva’s corporate training services to staff across a series of different departments, including their UK and European network.

There was a real need within Arriva to deliver a wide range of virtual training and information courses throughout the entire organisation, from compliance and onboarding through to health and safety programmes or distributing rapidly changing customer travel updates. Not only were the means of delivering L&D fragmented and varied across the organisation, the manual processes of organising, delivering and monitoring them was very time consuming and costly.

Being able to customise the portal for different operating companies proved to be a sound investment for Arriva as the Multi-tenancy functionality reduces LMS costs as the company only needed to purchase a single system to achieve its training outcomes.

The LMS solution had to have several key requirements, including:

The ability to deliver targeted courses to learners in different business units
Allow managers to view, monitor and track their team’s learning progress
Allow for future growth of the organisation’s learning needs

Provide powerful, customisable reporting tools
Be simple to administer and easily navigable for employees
Multi-tenancy functionality to cater for unique experiences for different transportation operators

Equally important in Arriva's decision making was compliance training delivery and management. Indeed, all new starters at Arriva are issued with a set of four compliance courses:

Information security
Financial crime
Standards of business conduct
Competing fairly

These courses must be completed by all employees within a four week window, with a required pass rate of at least 80%. Refresher training is also delivered for all employees every year.

A further challenge involved ensuring these mandatory compliance courses could be seamlessly delivered to Arriva's 39,000+ employees, spread across 12 countries in Europe. With so many different languages spoken, Arriva needed a powerful LMS to ensure that their compliance requirements could cost-effectively be met and that the necessary training could be delivered to all their employees, regardless of geographic location and language, while maintaining the highest levels of quality and efficiency.

Why Hubken and Totara

In 2017 Arriva partnered with Hubken Group to implement a Totara Learn platform (branded internally as Arriva Learning), themed to align with Arriva’s branding guidelines and configured to enable learners to easily access courses and comply with internal policy requirements.

Arriva chose the Hubken Group for their Totara partner for a number of reasons. Firstly, as a Totara Platinum Alliance Partner, they were able to (and continue to) demonstrate deep expert skills, not only on the Totara platform but, equally importantly, on how to really make an e-learning solution work for the business. And secondly, Hubken has an open, honest and fully collaborative way of working that fostered a friendly but professional relationship between the two organisations.

Totara Learn's Suitability for Compliance Training

Importantly, Totara Learn was especially suitable for Arriva because of its programme feature, which enables compliance training to be a fully automated process across an entire organisation. In Arriva's case, this could be used to automate course assignments based on user profiles (for example, by sending out invitations to new starters as soon as they join, ensuring that they take part in mandatory compliance training).

Furthermore, the system's ability to automatically send reminders to both the individual learner and their manager about their compliance status aligned perfectly with Arriva's need to ensure all training was completed within a four week window.

“Totara Learn really works for our users. It’s interactive and easy to navigate. It gives learners exactly what they need, and administration is intuitive and gives me the flexibility I need. I love the fact that it’s fully responsive – it makes my life easy because if somebody in the business asks ‘Can it do this?’, my answer is always yes. This makes the business happy, and that in turn makes me happy!”

Arriva

Rob Waggott, ERP SAP Training Consultant

The solution

Today, the relationship with Arriva and Hubken continues to grow and develop. Arriva Learning is now fully rolled out across Arriva’s business. The initial userbase of 250 learners has now climbed to be able to support close to 24,000 learners in just 5 short years.

Costs continue to be reduced and the multi-language capability of Totara Learn has meant that standardised training has been developed in multiple European countries and in 14 different languages.

Arriva Learning now offers a truly blended training programme across the UK and Europe, including knowledge assessments, tracking and monitoring of individual and team progress, automatic grading and certification.

Arriva is also utilising Totara Learn not only for hosting compliance training material, but also the captured data, setting up an integration between Totara and the existing Management Information system. This allows Arriva to use Totara Learn to create localised dashboards that highlight key statistics such as percentage completion rates specific to each business area, identifying Compliance Champions within each of Arriva’s different businesses and enabling managers to see how their teams are progressing. This has meant that compliance rates have increased while management time spent administering the training has significantly decreased.

Moving forward, the adaptability of Totara Learn means that Arriva is now exploring integrating it with their HR systems to provide a powerful link between the two systems and remove even more manual processes.

Key results include:

Winners of Totara's 2023 Best Compliance Experience award - find out more here
2024 winner of Brandon Hall eLearning award - find out more here
Since the system went live in 2018, there has been a total of 59,409 completions of the four compliance modules
Compliance training completion rate increased to 99% across the group, against a target completion rate of 95%
Automated CSV updates alone saves at least 1 hour per week in administration time
Dramatic rise in the number of users, from 250 in 2017 to more than 24,000 in 2023
28,480 course completions over the past year, primarily comprising Compliance, Diversity & Inclusion, Health and Safety and Health and Wellbeing courses
142 different courses available to all end users

Courses run in 14 different languages, including English
Eliminated monthly manual time spent processing and issuing completion reminders for four Compliance courses
Arriva Learning constantly receives positive feedback regarding the content and usability of courses, through emails from employees and reviews from compliance managers and senior executives

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Delivering an award-winning, company-wide learning solution with Totara Learn

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