What are Fortune 500s saying about Mentor?

Mentor's solutions are at work in corporations large and small, used by industry leaders such as GE, IBM, Lotus, Daimler/Chrysler, and Colgate-Palmolive, to help their employees master complex applications, technologies and processes. Here's what just a few of these customers are saying.

DaimlerChrysler offers a range of resources to employees who need to master software applications such as Lotus Notes–from classroom training to help desk support. Now, the company has added another powerful weapon to its arsenal: Mentor™ for Lotus Notes.

"We had the opportunity to test the effectiveness of Mentor's multimedia support with a group of engineers who typically don't have time to attend classroom or computer-based training courses," says Claudia VonDrak, supervisor of DaimlerChrysler's Customer Office Productivity Team.

The migration to Notes calendar took place over 17 weeks for over 6000 engineers. DaimlerChrysler tracked the number of hits to the Mentor database each week, as new groups of engineers were migrated. "The database log often reached 1400 uses before week's end," reports VonDrak. "Since that was that database count limit, we just used the 1400 number."

"With Mentor, DaimlerChrysler was able to give the engineers access to a virtual tutor, available wherever and whenever they needed help using Notes. The classroom training shows employees the standard operating procedures for Notes and Mentor helps people maintain what they learn in class and access that information while using Notes whether they are in their office, on the road, at home, or in a hotel."

When Lotus Development Corporation employees need to brush up on their Lotus Notes skills, they turn to Mentor, a multimedia education tool by Mentor CLS.

Marc Epner, North American Programs Director for Lotus Professional Services, explains, "How our customers learn and seek help is based on individual preferences. Mentor complements our solutions by offering a training aid that can be used while they're working in Lotus Notes."

Mentor's real-time method of teaching makes it easier for customers to make the most of the software, and the multimedia features of Mentor also make it unique. Epner concludes, "I'm a believer in Mentor. I may be an expert at using Lotus Notes, but even I need a tool like Mentor when new versions come along."

Jack Hill, Goodyear Tire and Rubber's manager of office systems technology, is the man in charge of the manufacturer's technological infrastructure. When the company upgraded its communications with a new version of Lotus Notes, it fell to him to make sure employees quickly learned how to use it. "We had some experience with computer-based training, but that was strictly screenplay and text, no voice or video," says Hill. "We first looked at Mentor about a year ago, at the prompting of IBM, with whom we have a longstanding relationship. Right away, we were attracted by the way Mentor used video that was actually synchronized with the audio. That made it attractive. It was also economical, not only in price, but in the way it used very little space on the hard disk to present a lot of useful information." Hill says he doesn't expect it to be a panacea for every end user. "People learn in different ways, but I expect this to help a lot of our people."

Even at IBM, there are people looking for a perfect way to teach staffers to use tech tools. Jerry Fensterstock is such a one. As director of brand management for IBM's corporate marketing division, he's responsible for building tools to support market planning. To ensure his staff became proficient with those tools, he turned to Mentor. "We've integrated Mentor into tools we built for ourselves—particularly, an internal company planning tool called the IBM Marketing Workbench" he says. "This is my own program, designed basically to enable the creation of business plans."

Why Mentor? "In a fairly concise way, it lets you describe processes and features that would be hard to teach without physically being in the room with the person trying to learn," says Fensterstock. "We have a lot of people spread all over the place. We have to be able to communicate information of this kind in a global, persuasive and effective way. Mentor is a good way to do just that."

Steve Miller, manager of collaborative computing for DuPont, first heard about Mentor from his local IBM representative who told him about IBM's partnership with Mentor CLS. He helped Miller arrange to bring in some Mentor CLS people to demonstrate their product.

At that time, DuPont had between 7,000 and 8,000 installed Lotus ID's (today, the company has 57,000 and is heading for 80,000). The demo sold Miller on Mentor. "What I saw was an ability to move out of the application you're in—Lotus Notes, for example—select from a menu and learn how to perform a task, right then and there," he says. "Or it could be used as a self-taught tutorial to learn the program. Recognizing that certain people learn well with a manual, we were trying to cover the others—the ones that don't learn from a book as well, or from training classes. One thing we wanted was help for everybody. And the second thing was to get that portion of the population that learns well from CBT up to speed more quickly than classroom training allowed. Mentor CLS helped us customize several modules unique to our environment," he says. "They met our needs very professionally and at a good price."