Blackwoods transforms workflows, reduces time to proficiency by 50%, and boosts productivity with WalkMe

Established 140 years ago, Blackwoods has grown from a small marine supply business into Australia’s largest provider of industrial and safety products with 55+ branches across Australia and New Zealand. With a product inventory of 300,000 items, Blackwoods makes more than 2.5 million annual deliveries to 200,000 customers – and staffs over 2800 employees in sales and customer care to serve its ever-growing customer base. Like any large distributed organisation, the need for ongoing staff training and up-skilling is paramount, both for employee and customer experience.

As a result of their WalkMe partnership, Blackwoods:

• Increased time-to-proficiency for new team members by 50%
• Slashed quote generation process by 15%
• Saves hundreds of staff hours every month with automation

As Blackwoods planned to deploy Microsoft Dynamics as part of a larger company-wide technology initiative, they needed to deliver an effective change management strategy to ensure team members were confident with the platform and could continue to deliver exceptional levels of customer service. Migrating to new tools is always a challenge, especially with such a large and geographically distributed workforce, but the usual approach of on-the-job training wasn’t an option since COVID restrictions forced many staff members to work from home.

“Unfortunately, the requirement for ongoing process excellence and new digital adoption coincided with the beginning of the pandemic lockdowns,” says Darryl Crumblin, Blackwoods Sales Training and Enablement Manager. “This meant that traditional face-to-face onboarding and enablement sessions were not possible.”

Crumblin says that, after considering a number of options, WalkMe was the ultimate winner.

“WalkMe solves the ‘learning decay’ problem with moment-in-time guidance, streamlining staff training and improving knowledge retention. The ability to make fixes on-the-fly protects data integrity and eliminates errors, so we avoid fulfillment issues and increase our customers’ satisfaction,” explains Crumblin.

The Blackwoods Way team worked closely with WalkMe to develop a tailored change management solution, which included training materials and automation that would guide staff through the steps required to complete each process used within the company, including the migration to Microsoft Dynamics.

“The team used WalkMe’s solution to automate tasks, thereby streamlining workflows, reducing risk, and saving staff time. Deployment of the WalkMe solution began in October 2020 and was completed in less than three months,” says Crumblin.

As a result of the WalkMe project, Blackwoods has been able to limit face-to-face training. Rather than requiring one week to learn the Microsoft Dynamics platform and refer to a 300 page manual, Blackwoods’ Sales team members get up and running after one-and-a-half days of self-guided lessons, or a 50% faster time-to-proficiency. Similarly, Blackwoods’ Customer Care members are now onboarded twice as fast, now requiring only one week of training.

“With traditional job aids, you need to search for the right page. WalkMe just knows what ‘page’ you’re on,” Crumblin explains. “Implementing process automation with WalkMe significantly streamlines everything from our order and sales processing to our inventory management, resulting in improved employee efficiency and a better customer experience,” says Crumblin.

For example, prior to WalkMe, issuing a new quote meant Blackwoods team members needed to complete 30 to 40 different steps. Using WalkMe, Blackwoods was able to automate more than half of those steps – and this change alone cuts 15% off the time taken to generate a quote and saves hundreds of hours of staff time every month.

“Blackwoods now has scalable, adaptable user training that not only handles initial enablement, but continues to provide ongoing up-skilling support for staff,” he says.

According to Crumblin, the overall aim of the WalkMe deployment has been to de-risk and accelerate the benefits of migrating from legacy software to cloud-based alternatives. “We have found WalkMe to be very flexible and adaptable, since it’s readily configured to match the specific requirements of Blackwoods – without the need for any additional code,” he says. “All of our automated workflows were also developed in-house using WalkMe.”

Crumblin says the rollout of WalkMe is a significant step for the company and will play a central role in their digital transformation, as digital adoption touches every area of operations and multiple systems. Based on the success in the sales department, the Blackwoods team is partnering with WalkMe to streamline and automate many other workflows and processes in different areas of the business.

This in turn, will deliver further significant time savings for staff, de-risk processes, and help the company scale faster to meet changing market dynamics.

“The ability that WalkMe gives Blackwoods to automate workflows and eliminate traditional face-to-face training sets us apart from our competitors,” Crumblin says.