Merit Medical Systems
Merit Medical Systems, Inc. was founded in 1987 and has become a leading manufacturer of medical devices used in cardiology and radiology procedures such as angioplasty and stent placement. Headquartered in South Jordan, Utah (a...
eLeaP has permitted our small technical staff to focus on other projects that are more unique and critical to our line of business, while knowing that the learning management system is fully functional and meeting our internal customer needs.
About Merit Medical Systems, Inc.
Merit Medical Systems, Inc. was founded in 1987 and has become a leading manufacturer of medical devices used in cardiology and radiology procedures such as angioplasty and stent placement. Headquartered in South Jordan, Utah (a suburb of Salt Lake City), Merit operates multiple manufacturing facilities in the U.S. and Ireland and employs nearly 1,700 people worldwide. The Company enjoys a position of world leadership within its market sphere and is renowned for its product innovation, product quality, and customer service.
What did they need from a learning management system
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Ineffective LMS
Replace poorly maintained and ineffective internally-hosted, open-source LMS
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Distributed workforce
Allow on-demand, remote training of world-wide workforce.
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Rapid deployment
Facilitate rapid deployment and simple updating of complex training materials
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Maintenance
Eliminate demand for system monitoring and maintenance
The solution we provided
Merit decided to replace its existing system, and knew that a hosted LMS was the wisest training vehicle for their company. The company had also discovered, however, that it simply did not possess sufficient IT resources to maintain an internally hosted platform. This meant selecting an outside service, and when the team at Merit reviewed eLeaP they knew they had found exactly what they needed.
On the user side, their experience with poor performance for remote users had taught Merit that their LMS absolutely had to be available 24/7, from anyplace in the world, and served with high data transfer speeds. By teaming up with THEPLANET as a hosting partner, eLeaP ensures 99.9% uptime. But eLeaP isn’t simply available, its intuitive and user-friendly interface makes it inviting. In fact, Merit’s employees are very satisfied with the ease with which they are able to access and complete required training programs.
On the developer side, Merit Medical placed a premium on rapid implementation and the elimination of any need for ongoing maintenance or service. Here again, eLeaP was a clear choice. Training materials can be available and ready to use in as little as 24 hours, and eLeaP handles all maintenance issues and provides system updates at no additional cost. Another feature of eLeaP that impressed those on the development side at Merit was the ability to embed training content from Google Apps. This not only saves the company time, it also ensures that the latest content is always available in their system.
Technical situation
Merit Medical Systems is a rapidly growing company with a workforce of nearly 1,700 individuals located across the U.S. and Europe. It isn’t surprising, then, that they turned to a hosted learning management system in order to carry out their employee training. After all, a well-designed, hosted training platform can be far more efficient and cost-effective than in-person training since it allows a scattered workforce to access identical training materials from anywhere and at any time. However, the internally hosted, open-source LMS that Merit Medical was using was not serving the company well.
Merit’s system provided acceptable levels of service for employees accessing it from on-site computers, but it performed very poorly for remote users—and a large percentage of users were remote. Conducting the maintenance and upgrades required to achieve acceptable performance from Merit’s existing system was not cost-effective. But it was also unacceptable to ask employees to continue suffering with an obviously inadequate system.
The results from implementing eLeaP's technology
Replacing their in-house learning management system with eLeaP has given Merit Medical Systems all of the benefits they desired. All of Merit’s employees are able to enjoy the ease and convenience of genuinely on-demand training materials brought to them through an intuitive and inviting interface. And the IT staff at Merit is especially pleased. Lincoln Cannon, Director of Web Systems at the company put it this way: “eLeaP has permitted our small technical staff to focus on other projects that are more unique and critical to our line of business, while knowing that the learning management system is fully functional and meeting our internal customer needs.” And at the level of the bottom line, Merit has saved tens of thousands of dollars in hardware costs and course development costs in just one year.