TruServ Corporation

"In a dynamic and highly competitive environment, providing continuous educational experiences and learning how to manage knowledge is crucial to success. Success in today’s global economy requires that learning and development experiences extend beyond your own employees to customers and other key members of your value chain. Forming a community of learning partners can become a competitive advantage.”
- Pamela Forbes Lieberman, President & CEO

Merging two major organizations places a challenge on the organizations to blend cultures and learning initiatives to ensure all the stakeholders are on the same field. When True Value Corporation and Servistar Coast to Coast merged in 1997, they formed one of the world’s largest member-owned hardware and home improvement cooperatives. TruServ now employs 3,659 people in the US, including 600 at its Chicago headquarters and serves more than 7,000 retail stores across the US and in 65 countries worldwide.

To accommodate the necessary culture shift, foster a single company identity, and meet key business strategies, TruServ leadership restructured its education and training infrastructure. It launched True Value University (TVU)- a one-stop training and development center that centralizes its learning activities, manages its generous tuition reimbursement program, and offers a wide variety of customized, onsite trainings in technical and business areas, management development, interpersonal skills, and communication. To accomplish its key business strategies, TVU designed and implemented several enterprise-wide educational campaigns for its employees, retail store staff and vendors. The educational campaigns benefited all three groups by helping them acquire the necessary skills and knowledge to operate its new inventory system and to develop a common language to understand each other’s perspectives, regional purchasing differences and vendor production schedules.

The success of using learning to achieve business goals and develop a shared culture is underscored by measurements taken by TVU, asking participants how training has impacted their businesses, observing store trends such as pre- and post-training sales figures, and documenting if store owners re-merchandize their stores following training sessions. The results suggest that the emphasis on using learning to forge a shared corporate identity and processes has paid off: in three years since the merger, inventory has been reduced by $300 million, and transportation is more efficient with 200 fewer trucks on the road. This creation of a new, merged corporate culture that embraces shared technology, such as inventory management, earned TruServ the coveted Information Technology Award from CIO Magazine in 2001.

Click here to view full case study. The information presented here was assembled in 2002. This does not necessarily represent the current status of TruServ.