How METRO trained 14,000 employees without a single classroom.

Roll out a critical application across 500+ store employees, without a face-to-face training relay that leaks at every step.

METRO France is the wholesale arm of a global retail group, with 98 outlets and around 14,000 employees. The IT team historically trained managers face-to-face, who then trained their teams in store. The model worked, but it had structural limits: knowledge retention dropped at every cascade level, and every change in the applications meant another round of relay training.

The trigger was concrete: a legacy application used by 500+ employees across the 98 outlets needed to be replaced. Doing it the old way meant booking trainers, blocking store managers, and producing PDFs that nobody would read on the shop floor.

On top, METRO’s application stack had grown: procurement, HRIS, ITSM, ERP and more — eleven applications in daily use. The IT department needed a single way to support adoption across all of them, without inflating training budgets and support headcount in proportion.

« Traditional training had its limits in terms of knowledge retention. We needed an approach built into the tools themselves. »

Olivia Vincent Head of IT User Services, METRO France

A pilot on one legacy app that scaled into the « application GPS » of 11 business tools.

METRO France started with a focused pilot two years ago on the legacy application being replaced, in lieu of any traditional training. The bet was simple: trust Lemon Learning’s in-app guidance entirely, with no fallback PowerPoint, no PDF library, no train-the-trainer day. The results were strong enough to roll out the model across the rest of the stack — eleven applications today, from procurement to HRIS, ITSM and ERP.

Governance lives inside the IT department, which owns application changes and is therefore best placed to keep guidance in sync. An internal knowledge management team was trained on the Lemon Learning back office and now produces and updates content on its own, with Lemon Learning’s team available as reinforcement when workload spikes.

« Our employees call Lemon Learning the ‘application GPS’. It tells them where to go, and it does it inside the tool, not in a classroom. »

Olivia Vincent Head of IT User Services, METRO France

Training costs under control, support tickets cut by 80%, users that find their way on their own.

« Thanks to guidance integrated directly into the application, we reduced incident tickets by 80% during deployment. »

Olivia Vincent Head of IT User Services, METRO France

« Lemon Learning is not intrusive; I use it when I need it. And it’s intuitive to use. »

METRO France employee End-user feedback

« Significant time savings, as I no longer need to search through my notes. »

METRO France employee End-user feedback

Like METRO, drop the cascade training and equip every store with an « application GPS ».

Book a personalised demo and see how Lemon Learning helps retail and wholesale teams roll out applications across hundreds of outlets, with IT-led governance.