builds solutions for industrial machine monitoring to help manufacturers achieve peak equipment health and optimize plant performance.
Dave Kraige is the Vice President of Advanced Solutions for KCF Technologies and is quoted throughout this case study.
$1.5 million
in training costs saved over 3 years
5x
more savings for most engaged learners compared to least engaged
4,300+
customers enrolled, completing over 12,000 courses
KCF Technologies sells a complex product: SMARTdiagnostics, a comprehensive hardware and software solution for industrial machine health.
Deploying their product and getting the most benefit from the data it generates requires training and ongoing collaboration with KCF’s team—but when used correctly, it can save their customers millions of dollars.
Travel costs, scheduling difficulties, and a finite number of qualified trainers meant that doing 100% live, in-person training was inefficient for both KCF and its customers. KCF needed a repeatable, scalable way to educate their customers, who are spread out at manufacturing plants all over the world.
As VP of Advanced Solutions, Dave Kraige’s first thought was to create a YouTube video training series. But using YouTube wouldn’t give the company any way to validate learning, monitor course completions, or offer testing and certification—all things their clients needed to track their own employees’ knowledge and progress. KCF Technologies also wanted to be able to have an open dialogue with their learners.
To accomplish all of this, KCF needed a powerful learning platform.
“Industrial machine health monitoring on a large scale can be intimidating, especially to new users of our product. I wanted a method to teach it to people in a repeatable, scalable way. Every time we interact with a new customer, I want them to understand why they should do business with KCF and what the benefits would be.”
Dave’s research quickly led him to Docebo. KCF Technologies was expanding and their client base was growing with them. Docebo had the flexibility to scale with them as they grew, while still remaining accessible for a smaller company.
Onboarding was efficient: KCF had a learning platform with self-enrollment, live courses, notifications, segmented users, and learning paths set up in just six weeks. Users could start earning certificates right away.
Even better, Dave quickly realized that with Docebo, he could expand his original vision and create training not just for customers, but also employees, vendors, and even potential investors within a single platform.
Docebo’s Central Repository makes it easy to store and manage course content so that KCF can easily duplicate training to create parallel versions for customers and employees. And Docebo’s branching structure and tailored content makes it easy for the company to build different learning paths, pages, and environments for different users. They’ve used Docebo’s localization tools and language capabilities to offer training for international users in their native language.
Now, KCF Technologies has a centralized, standardized, and repeatable training process that makes it easy for all relevant audiences to understand their product and get value faster.
They save instructor-led training for where it’s most useful, so that learners can get quality time with the KCF team when helpful but also learn at their own pace.
“After solving that initial challenge of educating our customers with 10 or 12 courses, we’ve expanded to teaching several different audiences, including customers, partners, and employees. We have over 500 courses now for all of those different audiences.”
Docebo has been a game-changer for KCF Technologies:
Dave estimates that the platform has saved the company $1.5 million in instructor time, travel expenses, and content development costs over the last three years.
And since expanding learning to internal audiences, KCF Technologies employees have completed over 23,000 courses. KCF Technologies’ products and services evolve rapidly, and being able to update that training content quickly has been crucial for the company’s success.
With a comprehensive guide to KCF’s product at their fingertips, new employee ramp-up time has decreased from months down to weeks—which gives KCF’s leadership team confidence that they will be able to continue to scale the business quickly.
Tailored, role-specific certifications give employees the product knowledge they need to perform their role, whether that’s sales, field support, or production. Supervisors can use these certifications to track employee growth.
KCF’s customers are seeing incredible value, too:
Over 4,300 customers are enrolled and have spent 12,000+ hours completing over 11,000 courses.
KCF’s purpose is to help manufacturers optimize their equipment and save money by eliminating unplanned downtime, waste, and unsafe conditions that can lead to workplace injuries. To that end, KCF tracks how much their customers engage with the learning platform, as well as how much customers save by using their products and services.
The correlation is clear: Customers who engage more with their learning platform perform much better when it comes to improving their own business. Customers with the highest learning engagement scores are saving more than 5x as much as those with low engagement, when measured as a percentage of their corporate revenue.
“The customers who save the most with our product are the ones who are most engaged with our learning platform. They’re learning how to use our product better and make better decisions about how to run their plant and how to maintain their machines…They learn, their plant runs better, and they make more money.”