Clarity Works with Car Rental Giant to Streamline Maintenance Operations
Challenge
A leading car rental company needed to improve its vehicle maintenance operations through a new training program, which would support the company’s overall cost-effectiveness initiatives and improve its customer service. The existing corporate culture, however, had the company managers focusing on sales and the heads of the local maintenance shops operating relatively independently.
Opportunity
Internal cultural differences, established working methods, external competitive pressures, and an overwhelmed in-house communications operation added to the urgency of the task. Company management asked Clarity to help develop a simple, effective training program that could explain the need streamlined operations and promote the changes required to thousands of employees. The principal audience was the company managers. They were responsible for profit and loss, but they needed to better understand how maintenance operations worked to cut costs, improve operations, and put better vehicles on the road for customers.
Clarity provided a consultant with proven skills in instructional design and computer-based training. He was also a skilled interviewer and understood corporate cultures and change management. His first task was to overcome internal resistance and skepticism from the employees that the program was intended to serve. He immersed himself in the company’s maintenance operations, gathering data on existing procedures and best practices and building relationships internally. The consultant served in multiple roles—trainer, coach, diplomat, reporter—with all the stakeholders.
The consultant gained an appreciation for the cultural context in which the training would be applied, which helped improve its effectiveness. He collected data, developed storyboards, and drafted materials for management review and approval.
Results
The consultant developed a four-hour training program that senior management delivered to local team members. Simplicity and ease of use were required to ensure a strong top-down message to the initial users; subsequent users could access the training online. Both senior management and the company managers benefited from the improved maintenance operations. The company’s profitability increased and financial incentives for the managers led to better maintenance. Online management dashboards created by the consultant enabled managers to monitor maintenance personnel and to track costs daily, weekly, and monthly.
Clarity enabled the client to:
- Streamline its maintenance operations.
- Effectively communicate changes in maintenance operations to its staff.
- Use management dashboards to monitor the time and money saved by implementing the change.