Polaris is an American manufacturer of high quality off-road consumer and military vehicles, including All-terrain vehicles (ATVs) and the Polaris RANGER,® GENERAL™ and RZR® side-by-side vehicles, snowmobiles, motorcycles and on-road electric/hybrid powered vehicles. Polaris, headquartered just outside of Minneapolis in Medina, Minnesota, was founded in 1954 and has grown to be an international enterprise.
With Polaris' immense expansion, it became apparent that technology would be a pivotal resource to their success. The need for a new Learning Management System to manage Polaris' sophisticated partner training programs put LatitudeConnect Suite front and center for Laurie Rengel, Manager of Service Dealer Development at Polaris.
"Latitude's solution is perfect for the Dealer industry. The brilliant thing about Latitude is that they have experience with a dealer network distribution channel. One of the main reasons why we made a switch to Latitude was because we are looking to penetrate within the dealerships more broadly," said Rengel, who manages the training and curriculum development group.
Latitude has a long history of delivering Learning Management Systems built to manage the extended enterprise training programs for dealerships, franchises, and other partners. LatitudeConnect Suite provides the tools needed to drive partner performance through the optimization of training, communications, measurements and incentives.
"Latitude's system gives us the flexibility we need and has the features that are going to allow us to not only present better, richer training material, but also reach deeper into the dealerships," Rengel continues, "the system also allows us to have control in what we do within our own program."
How does Polaris use LatitudeConnect to train its dealers?
Polaris saw a need to train its dealerships more effectively. Rengel spoke on a common training practice for organizations that have a dealership business model, or something similar, which is to hold training offsite. "Managers or representatives of each location are extracted from their everyday job responsibilities to attend, and usually at a high expense. When they return they are faced with two questions: Where do I start? And, how do I disseminate this information to all the people that did not attend."
Latitude will allow Polaris to overcome this typical training hurdle. Polaris will be using the system for both new and current dealership employees and owners.
"We have a training curriculum specifically designed for new dealers focusing on how to get started and all the initial 'need-to-knows'," said Rengel. "Then that leads them into the other, more specialty areas that guides them through the process of what to do.
Polaris is excited about the future of their training and communication curriculum coupled with the power of LatitudeConnect. The system launched to Polaris dealerships on October 26, 2015, with the Latitude team providing support through the entire process.
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