The Evolving Role of the LMS in Food and Beverage

Analyst Viewpoint

A rapidly growing food and beverage company must ensure its learning management system (LMS) can both support and facilitate its growth trajectory. Traditionally, the role of the LMS has often been limited to deploying training modules related to compliance and other operational goals. But many in the food and beverage industry are experiencing rapid change and are shifting their perspective to viewing the LMS as a more strategic tool to be used in improving business outcomes.

Modern learning management systems enable rapid growth by streamlining staff onboarding and providing timely, advanced training capabilities. An outdated mindset holds that the onboarding process is essentially about a new team member filling out paperwork, enrolling in benefits, and receiving facilities and system access. High-growth organizations in the food and beverage industry must go further than this to immerse new resources in the organization’s culture and ensure they have internalized the unique ways the organization carries out its mission and work. The LMS can enable this by making onboarding a high-quality, engaging experience—by offering a video message from the CEO instead of an emailed memo, for instance—and by ensuring the new employee is offered appropriate incremental learning experiences as he or she progresses through the first months at the organization. In fact, by 2025, we assert that LMS and LXP platforms with embedded skill and job ontologies that recommend optimal learning paths will guide one-half of organizations to elevate employee engagement, retention and productivity.

After onboarding, a high-growth food and beverage company must be able to rely on its LMS to inculcate and reinforce employee behaviors that are in line with a growth mindset. The system can enable this in two key ways:

• By utilizing social learning capabilities that share innovative approaches percolating within the workforce.
• By making readily available more formal learning content that reinforces a culture in which smart risk-taking is valued.

Leaders must be able to identify these key behaviors and cultural values and then transmit them in ways that won’t be shrugged off or ignored. The LMS has an important role to play as it provides the platform for leadership to spread its message effectively and helps workers personally connect with that message.

Periods of high growth also typically involve a sharpening of existing operations and the codifying of process improvements. To accommodate these changes—some might call them “growing pains” —food and beverage companies must identify and transmit best practices across the organization. The LMS must support this process as well.

More broadly, the LMS must help transmit the high-growth mindset. This is a mindset that embraces rapid learning, often by trying and failing. Helping a food and beverage organization move toward this higher-risk, rapid reward behavior requires more than just providing traditional learning experiences—it requires LMS-reinforced mindset and culture shifts.

While the LMS helps food and beverage companies by facilitating collaborative learning and improved knowledge sharing, it can also play an important role in how the organization interfaces with its external partners—producers, suppliers, logistics subcontractors and distributors. All these partners must quickly learn the organization’s processes and standards. An LMS that can facilitate external third-party training or offer self-service resources to these partners will clearly help the organization realize its rapid growth objectives.

The modern LMS must also support another type of external party: the food and beverage customer. A learning ecosystem that can deliver more than just internal training and learning experiences can be used to improve customer education and collaboration. For instance, availability of a library of product documentation that includes ingredients and nutrition information and a forum where common questions can be asked and answered will help reduce the need for high-touch customer service and partner interactions. When customers can be supported by the LMS, customer service personnel can efficiently and effectively deliver service to standards as the customer base expands and processes are more scalable.

In enabling rapid employee learning and culture transmission and in supporting external parties, utilization of the LMS is now shifting into a more strategic role for food and beverage companies. When used effectively, the right learning platform can be a key enabler of growth. Food and Beverage organizations facing opportunities—and risks—should ensure their technology is up to the task.