3M’s Global Course Delivery Drives Learner Productivity and Loyalty

Founded as a small-scale mining venture in 1902, 3M has grown to become a Fortune 500 multinational conglomerate that delivers 60,000-plus products to homes, businesses, schools, hospitals, and other industries. With corporate operations in 70 countries, 3M’s Maplewood, MN headquarters alone are so large that they have their own zip code: 55144.

To ensure that its 93,000 employees—along with customers and partners around the world—have the knowledge and skills they need, 3M relies on MadCap Xyleme Syndicate to centralize the delivery of learning assets to a range of internal and external systems. Let’s explore how 3M has improved diverse learners’ access to and comprehension of training content.

Conglomerates: A Continual Balancing Act

“Conglomerates juggle a delicate equilibrium between focus and breadth. On one hand, they benefit from risk dispersion—the failure of one subsidiary does not jeopardize the entire enterprise. On the other hand, maintaining coherence across disparate businesses poses managerial challenges,” venture firm FasterCapital observed in 2024.

For conglomerates, such as 3M, the sheer volume and variety of course content needed for tens of thousands of products and the customers, partners and employees who use and support them require a similar balance. Consistency is essential for ensuring quality and safety, as well as maintaining brand value. Meanwhile, the flexibility to deliver learning assets across a variety of existing systems is necessary for facilitating adoption.

Challenge: Managing Content Complexity at Scale

3M produces and delivers course content for a range of learners and requirements. These include internal onboarding for new 3M employees; product installation and usage for technicians, electricians, construction workers, healthcare workers and others; and training for sales managers, to name a few.

For years, 3M struggled with distributing content to customers, partners and employees quickly and efficiently. Because the company lacked a centralized approach, distributing content was time-consuming, inconvenient, and logistically difficult. For example, sharing content with partners or business customers would require several meetings to discuss how content would be uploaded to each organization’s learning management system (LMS). Then it would be a lengthy process to integrate 3M’s content into the other company’s LMS.

The distribution of learning content across multiple systems also made it difficult for the team at 3M to find the correct analytics based on the content they shared. As a result, it was difficult to track the effectiveness of the company’s courses.

3M realized that, in order to bring agility and actionable insights to its various training initiatives, the company would need a centralized system for distributing, managing and analyzing its learning content. After evaluating different industry solutions, 3M chose the MadCap Xyleme Syndicate cloud-based content delivery platform.

Streamlining Global Learning Content Delivery

3M now relies on MadCap Syndicate to serve as a single source of truth for all of its course content, whether learning specialists upload this content in the form of spreadsheets, Microsoft Word documents, PDF files, or other file formats. This is complimented by strong search capabilities that make it easy for both 3M course creators and learners to quickly find the learning assets they need.

Content managed by MadCap Syndicate can be delivered via the platform’s portal and by sharing links. It also can be easily linked to LMSs or other systems using application programming interfaces (APIs). Flexible delivery options have empowered the 3M Safety Industrial Business Group (SIBG), for instance, to easily share courses around the globe.

3M also takes advantage of analytics and reporting in MadCap Syndicate, as well as functionality for tagging content that allows the team to easily filter analytics. This enables the company to get clear, actionable insights, such as who is accessing course content, learners’ extent of engagement, and their level of comprehension.

Over 100% Growth in Course Access and Completions

In the first year alone since implementing MadCap Syndicate, 3M experienced a 183% increase in course completions and 133% growth in the amount of content reaching customers. 3M also was able to reduce the typical time to prepare and distribute a course from three months to one week, helping the company’s learning specialists to keep pace with new product and service offerings.

Most importantly, 3M’s ability to provide timely, valuable content to customers, partners and employees has helped to create the stronger relationships that drive loyalty, revenues and business growth.