SATO Holdings Corporation uses Docebo to cut employee ramp-up time in half

When HR Specialist Joao Celestino first started working at SATO Holdings, the company was in the middle of a global initiative, aptly named “ONE SATO,” to unify its company culture and processes.

With offices across 26 countries spanning a wide variety of cultures, languages, and audiences, the company was decentralized. Offices shared the SATO name, but employees didn’t feel connected to colleagues in other regions and HR initiatives were fragmented across offices.

The company realized that one of its major roadblocks was its inability to create global L&D initiatives: Their existing learning system was outdated and severely limited. Language localization and analytics were non-existent. Because of this, new employee onboarding was designed and conducted locally. Each office had its own processes, there were no companywide standards, and implementing anything from HQ was difficult. Onboarding a new employee could take over nine months, costing the company time and wasting valuable resources—not to mention increasing employee frustration.

Employees also didn’t have any way to learn about the company’s new products—they had to rely on individual managers for training. In addition, industry information provided by headquarters was difficult to share due to inconsistent knowledge levels across SATO employees. As a result, employees sometimes felt unsupported and they didn’t know where to turn to learn more about SATO’s products and solutions.

As a Japanese company, SATO was invested in a process called Nemawashi (根回し), which involves getting all of the major stakeholders on board with a demo version before choosing a learning system.

During this live demo consideration stage, Docebo stood out from its competitors for its supportive, collaborative approach, long before a contract was signed. Docebo helped SATO build a robust test learning environment and worked with them to answer questions about configurations and features.

With advanced localization options, multilingual capabilities, audience segmentation, and the capacity to scale and serve thousands of employees worldwide, Docebo checked all of SATO Holdings’ boxes—including boxes they hadn’t realized they had, like AI auto-tagging, API integrations, and course catalogs. SATO Holdings was quickly able to build and launch standardized, industry-specific employee onboarding materials in all of their local languages.

They also created product training materials, so that existing employees could fill knowledge gaps and build their skills. With easy-to-find, self-serve training available for every SATO product, employees could easily complete product training, while managers could track their progress and completion rates through Docebo’s analytics.

From the early demo days to their current learning suite, the Docebo account manager’s unwavering support has made Joao’s work so much easier, from implementing the initial system to choosing features and solutions for SATO’s specific use case as the company scaled its L&D efforts.

Since implementing Docebo, SATO Holdings has cut average new employee onboarding time in half, from 9 months to 4.5 months. This means new employees can start generating value for the company much sooner. Employee headcount has also grown by 20%—supported by their new global standardized onboarding.

Existing employees are also reaping the benefits of the new learning system: They can easily find product information and training without having to ask their managers, enabling a culture of continuous learning throughout the SATO Group.

SATO’s siloed culture is slowly transitioning towards a more open one, as employees report feeling more connected to their colleagues across the world. Employee turnover rates for new employees have decreased from 30% down to below 10%, and employees report higher job satisfaction, too.

Managers have been empowered to take an active role in their employees’ development. Now, they can easily track training completion rates and guide employees interested in promotion towards the right courses to build the skills they need.

The company has managed to build a stronger sense of unity worldwide, bringing it closer to the idea of “ONE SATO”.