Customer Story
Growing Revenue—Without the Growing Pains
Transamerican Auto Parts helps its employees get the right training and development through an intuitive learning management platform as the company rapidly grows.
Mission
Our mission is simple – To be the best supplier of Truck, Jeep, and SUV aftermarket products. We will exceed our customers expectations, and give our employees the opportunity to excel.
The Challenge
We need new team members to feel like they are set up for success, especially in the wake of rapid growth. All while making sure seasoned team members continue to grow their knowledge about our products and offerings in order to continue serving our customers and remain a leader in our space.
The Objective
While scalable growth is a common objective for many businesses, it comes with a myriad of challenges. One of the most difficult parts is reliably enabling new talent to be productive, as quickly as possible. In fact, according to an article in Training Industry Quarterly, it takes 12 months to 2 years before an employee is “fully productive”. Getting people onboard quickly and with no hiccups is critical to operational success, especially for a business like Transamerican, which constantly opens new retail locations across the country.
In addition to ramping new employees, Transamerican aims to ensure that every employee at every level has the right training for their role. As they tend to promote employees from legacy stores to run new locations, many employees find themselves taking on more responsibility with each move. Transamerican wants to ensure these new managers, as well as more seasoned managers, get exactly what they (and their teams) need on an ongoing basis.
Before Bridge, [the managers] had no visibility into the training, it was all coming on me to let them know where employees were in the onboarding/training process. Now they can go in and look for themselves and track their own guys; they appreciate having that stuff at their fingertips.-Tim Boone, Training Manager
The Approach
While other companies look for ways to standardize processes, Transamerican decided to do things a little differently. They believe in a tailored approach to how they train their employees. With the goal of increasing employee ramp rates, onboarding quality and ensuring that managers are supported for success, Transamerican leveraged Bridge to:
Leverage online learning to decrease ramp time
Transamerican is a giant machine that requires efficiencies at all levels. They are driven to consistently grow their bottom line. With economic pressures beyond their control, they knew that their average ramp rate of nine months for sales employees was too long. By transitioning a large part of their employee learning and training online, they were able to shorten the sales ramp time to under 90 days.
Deploy impactful training for managers
When Transamerican promotes a new manager, they need to know both the nuts-and-bolts of running a store and have managerial skills. Transamerican created trainings around operational skills such as navigating complex reports and completing daily operational requirements. In addition, Transamerican provides training around how to an effective leader and how to help your teams be successful. By partnering with Bridge, Transamerican enhanced their managerial training program to cover both logistical and soft skill requirements for new managers.
How Transamerican Measures Success
By scaling their training for store managers and new employees through Bridge, Transamerican was able to:
- Decrease onboarding time
The average onboarding time decreased from 9 months to 3 months. - Increase revenue
Over 10% increase in sales revenue that could be attributed to the onboarding and sales management training. - Decrease turnover
Overall sales attrition decreased by 50% as Transamerican found a way to support their sales teams more effectively.
Industry
Auto-Manufacturing
Established
1961
Headquarters
California