Customer Testimonial: Transforming Workforce Development with Vector LMS and Training

Michigan Sugar Company faced a critical workforce shortage due to retirements and the impact of COVID-19, leaving them with 30% fewer operators and staff. Without a formal training program, new hires relied on unstructured, on-the-job learning, which could take up to 15 years to develop the necessary skills. The company needed a scalable solution to train employees faster, improve safety, and attract top talent.

To address this, Monte Ackerman, Director of Engineering and Maintenance, turned to Vector Solutions to implement a structured training program. With standardized learning paths, safety training, and maintenance training, Michigan Sugar Company accelerated workforce development and improved retention. The results were immediate—70% of operators remained on staff during maintenance periods, employees at all levels engaged with the training, and demand for learning surged. Even senior staff with 20+ years of experience found value in the program. Additionally, Michigan Sugar Company worked closely with union leadership to preview and test the training, ensuring alignment with workforce needs. Encouraged by these results, the company is now expanding training efforts to include leadership and soft skills, ensuring long-term workforce success.

Watch the video to learn how Michigan Sugar Company transformed workforce training with Vector Solutions. Request a demo today to learn how you can streamline training, improve retention, and build a safer, more skilled workforce.

Video Transcript:

I’m Monte Ackerman, Director of Engineering and Maintenance, Michigan Sugar Company. I oversee operational excellence. So a little bigger than maintenance or engineering, also operator training and supervisor training.

So at Michigan Sugar Company, we did not have a good strategy to prepare for the retiring, baby boomers and we lost a fair amount of those folks before the COVID and then after COVID many people didn’t come back and we were down about thirty percent of our operators and staff in our factories and we didn’t have a good way to bring in new help and we were using I’ll say kind of a traditional non structured on the job training so they just follow people around and try to figure out what they did. And it probably really took us about fifteen years to train a qualified operator to run our entire factory.

And so, we ran about two years with, lacking about thirty percent to twenty to thirty percent of people in our factories and so this was a core initiative to help us create learning paths and to standardize and formalize the training and not only train people faster but we do believe it will be important in attracting higher quality candidates who are really looking for growth and development as part of that job selection. The volume of topics and content that Vector had really stood out, and I was excited when I contacted Rhuann, and found out that they now also had Convergence LMS and had learning paths already kind of pre developed or pre staged.

And then we’re also interested in the safety improvement aspects. So it’s like the power of the platform has continued to grow and improve and better meet our needs. You know, I guess we didn’t feel that the other competitors really stacked up. What we’re in the process of and we’re on the path with is we’ve created a maintenance training plan for operators. So in Sugar we shut down for a maintenance period for about four months and we retained about seventy percent of the operators who do maintenance.

And we had never formally trained those operators and so we saw this tremendous opportunity to create value by giving them the fundamental maintenance skills and education and it’s kind of shattering people’s perceptions about how easy we can make this and how readily accessible we can make this because there’s a lot of concerns from the factory managers of whether or not we could even train eight people. So we’re seeing that as a big success and now we’re really looking to launch into the next phase which will be to train leaders through some of the soft skills training. So when we created the initial training plan, we’re a union facility and so we work with union leadership and made sure they were, along for that ride and were part of the process of not so much developing the training, but previewing it and really test driving vector.

And there was certainly fear from some of the employees about content of math, you know, being one of the ones that scared them the most. I haven’t done that since high school and it’s been twenty years and I wasn’t good then. And really that melted away very quickly. As soon as we got the first people in, you know, they quickly started to realize it.

You know, I had the experience of having hundreds of people having gone through some of the premium modules and that also put in that same math topics. So we have a huge demand now. We have a lot of people asking for the training so it’s almost like it’s on fire and they can’t get enough. So that’s been kind of an exciting happenstance.

I’d say we’d like to say we did that by design but we kind of locked into that by just trying to make sure we were successful and managed the process well. We expected when we offered the training, we would get some of our newer people like zero to two year people who are new to our company.

But the reverse kind of happened and we had more senior people. It’s like twenty years experience sign up and and that, creates some interesting comments because they felt that, training was very valuable and offered a lot of knowledge and information they really didn’t know even though they’ve been working at our factory for twenty years. And they believed it was, job related and pertinent to what they did every day.

So that’s part of how I, ramped up that demand, that perception of how we were using instructional training design to develop the right progression, the right path, the right content, and our people are very excited. So it’ll greatly improve their ability to do work.