Vestas's challenge
Danish company Vestas is the world leader in wind power: over 24,000 employees in 76 countries and 59,909 wind turbines installed by 2016. But its market changed the rules. Especially from 2009 onwards, wind power buyers stopped negotiating directly between two parties, often at subsidized prices, and switched to a tender-based system.
Winning now means teaming up with partners, securing better prices from suppliers, fully understanding the contractor and building long-term relationships. And all with a highly dispersed workforce, often in remote areas next to the turbines, that needed to train in their own language, on any device and at their own pace.
- Adapt negotiation skills to a tender model built on partnerships
- Train a global, highly dispersed workforce, often in remote locations
- Offer fully flexible training in several languages
- Strengthen soft skills and the company's human capital
The solution
Vestas' training and development team chose Merchants, Game Strategies' serious game for negotiation training. It takes players back to fifteenth-century Venice, where they must become the best merchant in the city over 6 negotiations.
It was a perfect fit: it's based on the Harvard approach to negotiation and focuses on exactly what the new market demanded, identifying the other party's interests, finding alternatives, creating value with partners and growing the pie to reach win-win agreements. And it goes beyond theory: its simulator makes players present proposals and close deals with tough negotiators, in conditions very close to Vestas' day-to-day reality.
All it took was a username and password to play anywhere, anytime, and the course was available in English, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese, so every employee could learn in their native language.
The games they played
Vestas on video
In their own words
The renewable energies industry is changing. The importance of understanding how we can work together with a partner to create value and become more competitive to secure tenders has become increasingly more crucial. The platform has been a great help in this
Today I am a better negotiator. Learning is much easier and quicker with videogames. If you're having fun with what you're doing, you will learn better
Game Strategies has the value of other e-learning platforms, but with added elements of competition among players, engagement and personalized feedback. Overall, it is an enhanced version of these e-learning platforms
The results
2016 was the best year in Vestas' history: €10,237 million in revenue, up 21.5% year on year, and the staff's new negotiation skills helped drive that growth. In countries where tendering was already the norm, such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Peru, Russia and South Africa, the company increased its results with projects of over 3 gigawatts.
The people who took the course were convinced too: all of them found it applicable to their work, 95.2% recommend it and 95% made it to the end.
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