Founded in 1899, Cycle & Carriage is a leading automotive group based in Southeast Asia and a member of the Jardine Cycle & Carriage Group. Cycle & Carriage distributes, retails, and provides aftersales services for new and used vehicles in Singapore, Malaysia and Myanmar. Some of the brands represented by Cycle & Carriage in the region include Mercedes-Benz, Mitusbishi, Kia, Citroën and more.

The Challenge

In 2018, Cycle & Carriage embarked on an HR transformation roadmap. One of the areas related to developing employee capabilities and the team had three challenges to address.

  1. Democratizing Learning Within the Organization

    Prior to working with SmartUp, the existing learning programs consisted of mostly face-to-face learning. Whilst they were high touch, such programs were also costly and were not always available to all employees in a timely fashion. Therefore, Cycle & Carriage looked to move towards a hybrid model, combining digital learning with bouts of face-to-face learning. The goal was to make everyday learning accessible to all employees in the organization, in line with their strategy of continuous learning.

  2. Building an Accessible Domain Learning Library

    Over the years, Cycle & Carriage had built up a large library of industry domain materials that were only available to specific functions. For instance, automobile product specifications were only available to sales and service staff. However, the goal was to make these materials available to a wider audience of employees, giving them the freedom of choice on what to learn and when. The aim was to build a T-shaped workforce, with employees gaining broad and deep knowledge beyond their functional domains.

    For the Singapore market, this opened avenues for employees to weave their experiences and tied in with the internal staff mobility practice, where employees can request for transfers to other departments. Making these domain materials available gave staff a preview of the product knowledge required when they were considering any role transfer. Overall, the cross-domain knowledge sharing across different departments helped Cycle & Carriage build a more informed and engaged workforce.

  3. Improving Mandatory Training Efficiency

    One of Cycle & Carriage’s organizational requirements was periodic mandatory training. To make the process more efficient and effective, moving into digital was the logical choice.

Based on the challenges above, Learning & Development was one of the cornerstones of Cycle & Carriage’s digital HR transformation that started in 2018. This eventually led them to source for a new digital learning platform.

Why Cycle & Carriage Chose SmartUp

To address the challenges faced, Cycle & Carriage set out to find a digital platform that could meet the following requirements:

  • An easy-to-use content authoring tool with a simple user interface
  • Content conversion services to repurpose existing domain materials
  • The ability to purchase content to supplement internal materials

Additionally, Cycle & Carriage preferred to look at digital learning experience platforms that were agile and skipped the full-suite Learning Management Systems. The features offered by SmartUp fit the bill perfectly, with an intuitive content creation tool and simple user interface. Furthermore, the content services available from SmartUp strengthened the platform use case.

Besides the platform fit and content services available, the initial meetings between both teams went well, with positive experiences from both sides.

The Results

In 2018, Cycle & Carriage Singapore began using the SmartUp platform, allowing employees to access bite-sized microlearning content on the go at their convenience. Employees were given access to a wide variety of content, from personal development and skills upgrading to onboarding training, mandatory compliance and more.

The platform was even used as part of the sales team’s daily morning meetings. Eventually, usage of the SmartUp platform expanded to include users from Malaysia and Myanmar.

Based on Cycle & Carriage Singapore’s community usage data over a 2-year timeframe on SmartUp, the following trends were observed:

1. Digital learning cuts across most of the organization’s functions, with the top 20-50 learners coming from a variety of functions e.g., sales, the technical team, service staff and seniority levels. Another interesting insight was that most of the top learners are achievers or consistent performers within their respective functions.

2. The learning data across the group was too widespread to obtain any data points by age, function, or staff categories. This highlighted that learning was prevalent across the organization and not limited by any specific group.

3. Employees consumed anything and everything, and learning was not limited to only content that was relevant to them.

The communication and partnership with the SmartUp team has been awesome. Before we roll out a campaign that’s seemingly difficult, we bounce off ideas with the SmartUp team first to foresee pitfalls and find workarounds. The communication channel is open and constructive, and we give feedback openly to the SmartUp team. If there’s improvement to the platform – we all benefit and grow better together. I think over the last 3 years, the partnership has strengthened mutually.

There’s the old adage of treating others how you would like to be treated – respect is one of Cycle & Carriage’s core values, and we exemplify this in our partnership with our vendors as well.

Jeslin Lim, Divisional Manager, Human Resources, Cycle & Carriage Singapore

Are you looking to foster a culture of continuous learning within your organization in order to break down silos? If you’d like to promote knowledge sharing and upskill your workforce through engaging, gamified microlearning content, get in touch with us here.

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