Context
This medium-sized manufacturing company is situated in the province of Quebec. In the past 15 years, it changed owners five times. In 1995 – 1997, the owners invested more than 180$ million in a modernisation project while significantly reducing their workforce, from 1100 to 650 employees.
After:
- The analysis of the demographical situation;
- Realizing that the current training system could not deliver the increase in productivity necessary to stay competitive;
- Realizing the need to identify and document best practices in order to pass them on to new employees.
the company’s management decided to implement a new training structure based on skills management.
Challenge
The main goals established by management in order to measure the contribution of training to the company’s productivity were:
- To increase the paper machines’ efficiency;
- To reduce the non-conformities.
These goals were refined to take into account the challenges of production, maintenance, human resources and unions.
Our Proposal
Partnership with HumEng and utilization of a training management software to manage the process.
The implementation of the process is divided into three phases:
- Development of job and equipment skill profiles and coaching of key players;
- Pilot project in a key department;
- Deployment in the other departments.
Some Results
- Identification and documentation of necessary skills for each job and critical equipment;
- Automated identification of training needs by comparing employees’ skills with the necessary skills identified for a job;
- Best practices for skills identified, crystallized and documented;
- Generic skills transferable from one job to another, from a department to another, from an equipment to another;
- Trimestral skills rate (by job, department and equipment);
- Prediction of training needs and minimal workforce in order to support the succession plan;
- Documentation and management of formal and informal training by job;
- Centralization of training budget preparation and decentralization of training execution;
- Estimation of savings in training costs for production jobs only: $1,968,000.