Company Background
This client is an enterprise supermarket chain with a complex mix of business units across grocery, pharmacy, beauty, retail operations, and corporate support functions. Their Learning & Development team supports training needs across a workforce of hundreds of thousands of employees, while also managing requests from multiple internal teams, brands, and operational groups.
Within the broader organization, the Learning & Development function is a small but highly active team responsible for enterprise-wide learning requests, training design, development, learning operations, leadership programming, and learning system updates. As more learning work moved in-house, the team needed a more reliable way to manage intake, track active projects, and give leadership clear visibility into what was happening across the department.
The team had been using monday.com for several years, but without a formal implementation plan. Over time, different teams built their own boards, forms, views, and tracking methods. What started as a project tracker had grown into a messy system that no longer reflected how the team actually worked.
The Challenge
As the Learning & Development team expanded its role across the enterprise, their monday.com setup could not keep up with the complexity of the work.
No single source of truth
The team needed monday.com to become a reliable place where senior leaders could see what was in progress, what was paused, what was delayed, and why. Instead, the data could not be trusted enough to power accurate dashboards or leadership reports.
Duplicate project tracking
The same project often appeared in multiple places because different teams were tracking their own part of the work separately. For example, a learning partner might manage the overall project while the learning experience team tracked the development work somewhere else. This created duplicate records and made reporting inaccurate.
Inconsistent board structures
Different teams used monday.com in different ways. Some used detailed task templates, while others used boards mostly for capacity tracking or intake. Because the column names, statuses, and board structures were not consistent, it was difficult to report across the entire Learning & Development function.
Manual reporting for leadership
Leadership wanted real-time visibility into project volume, status, delays, business unit demand, and team capacity. But because the data was fragmented, team members were still manually pulling information together to answer basic questions.
Multiple intake paths
The team had several forms and boards for different types of requests, including new learning, maintenance, system uploads, license requests, leadership sessions, and general inquiries. The intake process worked, but it was not organized in a way that gave the team clean reporting on the back end.
A changing operating model
The original setup was built when the team’s process was more linear and much of the learning work was outsourced. Once more design and development moved in-house, the team needed a new structure that matched their current operating model.
Together, these issues created a major data integrity problem. The team had plenty of activity inside monday.com, but the information was too fragmented to confidently answer leadership’s most important questions.
The Solution
Simpleday helped the team rebuild their monday.com environment around cleaner data, clearer ownership, and better reporting.
A project-based structure
Instead of tracking work by team, Simpleday recommended moving to a project-based structure. Each project would exist once as the parent item, with related tasks managed as subitems. This allowed learning partners, designers, developers, and operations team members to contribute to the same project without creating duplicate records.
Cleaner project and task hierarchy
The new structure used parent items for the overall project and subitems for the detailed work. This made it easier to see who owned each part of the process, what still needed to be done, and where a project was getting stuck.
Consistent reporting fields across boards
Because different request types required different information, Simpleday did not force everything into one board. Instead, the system kept separate boards where they made sense, while standardizing the key reporting columns across them. This allowed each team to track the details they needed while still feeding consistent data into leadership dashboards.
Dashboard-ready data
Simpleday helped structure the boards so leadership could view project data by status, business unit, L&D team, request type, and level of effort. This gave the team the foundation for real-time reporting instead of manual data pulls.
Improved intake organization
The team’s intake process was reviewed and refined so requests could be captured more cleanly from the start. By improving how requests entered monday.com, the team reduced the risk of messy data later in the workflow.
A better leadership view
Simpleday helped translate the leadership team’s reporting needs into practical monday.com dashboards. The goal was simple: leaders should be able to open monday.com and immediately understand what was happening without asking the team to manually prepare an update.
The Impact: A Reliable Source of Truth for Enterprise Learning Operations
The transformation gave the Learning & Development team a much stronger foundation for managing enterprise-wide work.
- One project, one record: Duplicate project tracking was removed by shifting to a parent project and subitem structure. This gave the team a cleaner way to manage shared work across learning partners, designers, developers, and operations.
- More reliable reporting: With cleaner data and consistent reporting fields, dashboards could now reflect the real state of the work, including active projects, paused work, delays, request types, and team involvement.
- Clearer visibility for leadership: Senior leaders gained a better way to understand what the team was working on, where work was delayed, and how demand was distributed across the organization.
- Less manual effort: By improving the structure of boards, intake, and dashboards, the team reduced the need to manually gather updates for leadership reporting.
With Simpleday’s support, this enterprise supermarket chain transformed monday.com from a scattered collection of boards into a cleaner, more reliable system for managing work across Learning & Development. The team can now track projects with more confidence, report to leadership with better data, and continue scaling their learning operations with a structure that matches how they actually work.
