Case Study: Flash Earns Pole Position for Safety-Kleen’s Video Training

Perhaps you've been stuck in traffic behind one of their bright yellow service trucks with black and red S-shaped logo. Or perhaps you've noticed the same colors and logo on Tony Raines’ #96 NASCAR vehicle, or on equipment at your local auto service center the last time you had your car in for repair. They are Safety-Kleen, a provider of parts washers and industrial waste and oil recycling and re-refining services. They've got 400,000 customers all over North America, 160 sales and service locations, and 4,500 employees—all of whom need continual training.

And how do all those people get their training? Well, through streaming video, of course.

"As soon as I heard that (Macromedia Flash by Adobe) was coming out with video support in 2002, I went all on it," says Frank Hanfland, manager of training technology and interactive media for Safety-Kleen. "We jumped on the bandwagon immediately. We realized that this was our answer to our problems." He says he was particularly drawn in by the "exceptional quality of the video stream." And with Flash 8’s new VP6 codec, he says, "you can generate DVD quality without problems. And it is very cost-effective. It is the ideal solution for us."

Safety-Kleen needed a training delivery solution because they were stuck in the old videotape distribution rut. "We had old VHS tapes being played and played and played, and we had significant issues with signal degradation and quality degradation. I mean, some of those videos are so snowy you think your TV is tuned to a no-channel," says Hanfland.

"Once we had a video produced, it took forever (by that I mean, a week) to get those videotapes duplicated and shipped to the location. We produce videos usually in three to four days (from initial filming to release) and the duplication process alone tacks a week onto that. So that was a significant delay in our project cycle."

Then too there was the added cost of tape distribution. "Every single videotape cost around $2 to duplicate and then another $5 to ship," says Hanfland. "Multiply that times 160 locations, and that's around $1,000 every single time." Since Safety-Kleen has turned to streaming video, they've been saving at least $1,000 on distribution costs each time they release a new video.

"Now we can bring video training out to our folks much sooner, which means that if we have a new product that we're showcasing, the sales and service people can learn about the product a week earlier. And they can start selling and servicing the product a week earlier," says Hanfland. "So we make money a whole week earlier on that, and that's a significant factor."

Today. Hanfland and his crew of two simply deposit their finished videos onto the Safety-Kleen "elearning server," where the videos are available to any of the company's 4,500 employees on demand at their convenience.

Hanfland says that thanks to Flash, the company's training videos require almost nothing from the end user. "When you download, it downloads a self-extracting .zip file so you don't need to do anything, and it puts it into ‘My Documents,’ creates a folder called "sk_video," puts the stream and the player in it, and you can take it wherever you want to go," he says.

"It buffers fast, and the quality is great. That's why we use Flash Video over Windows Media. If I used Windows Media, I'd have problems. I'd have to compress it at a much higher bit rate to get the same speed and performance, and then the quality would degrade," says Hanfland. "And the other issue with Windows Media is that they change their codec every three and a half minutes," he says jokingly.

"Windows Media is really very good, but the problem there is the codec updates. It has to download, it has to install. And we have firewalls here. Things are secured and locked down, so even if employees could get to the codec on demand, it wouldn't install." And this codec update process is "ungraceful," according to Hanfland. "It doesn't even give you an error message; it just doesn't do it," he complains. "That's not acceptable. I have to have a way that I can reliably, all the time, deliver high-quality video in the shortest amount of time, and Flash video is the tool to do that."

Hanfland doesn't like Apple QuickTime very much either. "It is not acceptable for a corporate office, because they try to sign you up for the iPod music player and other things," says Hanfland. "I don't want to listen to music stations, and I certainly don't want my people listening to music stations. I want to support and enhance their performance."

You get the same sort of problems with RealNetworks, according to Hanfland. "Real Media just bombards you with advertisements," he says. "With Flash we have reliable playback 100 percent of the time. We don't have to worry about getting a different player or a different codec or getting bombarded by advertisements."