How YANMAR America Drives Business Growth and Customer Satisfaction

Training is critical to YANMAR. By partnering with Cornerstone, the company vastly expanded its training accessibility to help dealers sell YANMAR engines and improve customer satisfaction.

YANMAR is a leader in designing and manufacturing advanced performance diesel engines, diesel-powered equipment, and gas-fueled energy systems. The company manufactures 500,000 diesel engines and sells them to dealers and original equipment manufacturers across industries like farming, construction, marine, and more.

Training is vital to ensure dealers and customers get the most out of YANMAR products. These training are increasingly necessary to use, maintain, or repair YANMAR engines and equipment.

YANMAR selected Saba Cloud Extended Enterprise from Cornerstone to manage and scale their instructor-led training (ILT) and increase their online training. This increase was critical with the onset of COVID-19, allowing YANMAR to quickly move all training online without missing a beat.

Before Training Systems Developer Bill Morgan joined YANMAR America, there was only ILT. By partnering with Cornerstone, the company launched ten vendor-sourced titles in 2018. YANMAR branded the platform, POWER//Train — a riff on the source of propulsion in an engine. Then YANMAR began to create its own custom content and grow its online learning library. In 2020, Morgan estimates YANMAR developed some 70 new courses — bringing POWER//Train to almost 200 courses.

“They can be from 5–10 minutes to an hour-long,” Morgan explains. “A lot of them are how-to’s — how to change oil, for example,” explains Morgan.

Having these courses available online saves time and expenses for both YANMAR and its partners — allowing everyone to prioritize only the most necessary courses for in-person training.

And when COVID-19 forced everything remote, the ability to have online courses kept YANMAR’s business moving forward and their customers and partners happy. Rather than trying to accommodate learning needs over the phone, Morgan said, with Saba Cloud Extended Enterprise, the company had the infrastructure to send customers directly to whatever training resources they needed.

“Now we just tell people to go to POWER//Train and take this course we've signed you up for,” Morgan says.

In this way, YANMAR’s learning helps drive customer and partner satisfaction — allowing those parties to quickly and easily access training to meet their immediate needs.

But YANMAR’s training capabilities are also quickly evolving into a competitive differentiator. Morgan says many customers have been excited to have access to training videos whenever they need them, making it easier for them to use YANMAR’s engines over competitors’.

The training is also key for YANMAR dealers since many of them sell YANMAR engines alongside competitors’. The training helps dealers be better salespeople of YANMAR’s product. Morgan says YANMAR is planning to offer dealers incentives for completing the training.

In addition to driving the business today, Morgan and the YANMAR team see using their extended enterprise learning solution as a way to ensure the company can grow and innovate.

Currently, YANMAR is working on standardizing its training globally. Their extended enterprise learning model is already active in not only the U.S. market but also in Europe, Japan, and Singapore.

“The idea is that we use the same system, same courses, same training for everybody worldwide,” Morgan says. “We have 12 languages already in addition to English. In the next two years, it's going to take off.”

He said COVID-19 posed only a slight slow-down in what they were able to accomplish.

Because YANMAR’s industry is always growing, their products are always changing as well. Morgan says online learning powered by extended enterprise learning makes sure dealers, customers, and other partners are up to date and don’t miss a beat.