Case Studies Archives - Skills Base

Trane Enhances Technician Training and Development

Nick — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 23:43:07 +0000

Trane, a leader in industrial machinery manufacturing, faced significant challenges in managing and developing the skills of its vast technician workforce. Initially relying on cumbersome Excel spreadsheets, Trane sought a more efficient and scalable solution to track and enhance the skills of its technicians across North and Latin America. By adopting Skills Base, Trane has successfully streamlined its skills management process, resulting in improved training programs and more effective technician deployment.

trane.com

Industrial Machinery Manufacturing

10k+ Employees

The benefits

Improved Skill Visibility: Managers now have a clear understanding of technician skills at individual, team, and regional levels. This visibility helps identify skill gaps and plan targeted training interventions.
Enhanced Training Programs: Skills Base data is used to recommend relevant LMS courses to technicians, ensuring they receive the training needed to close skill gaps and advance their careers.
Efficient Technician Deployment: Integrating Skills Base with Salesforce allows Trane to assign the right technician to the right job, improving service efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Consistent Skill Standards: Standardized skill assessments ensure that technicians are evaluated uniformly, regardless of their location.

The use cases

Resource Allocation

Learning and Development

The Challenge

Mike Soucy, Service Solutions Architect Commercial HVAC Americas at Trane, described the initial situation as having inconsistent skill assessments. Technicians across different regions were assessed using varied criteria, leading to inconsistencies in skill evaluations. Additionally, managing skill data for 250 technicians with over 200 skills in Excel spreadsheets quickly became unmanageable. Technicians also often lacked clear guidance on the training they needed to advance their skills and careers.

Implementation and Outcome

Trane adopted Skills Base to address these challenges, starting with a pilot program of 250 Technicians in the Southern Atlantic region and eventually expanding to cover North and Latin America. Skills Base has now grown to include the remaining Regions in their CHVAC Americas business which includes 2926 Service Users, 157 Contracting Users (soon to grow to over 600) and a handful of General Leadership and Corporate users.

Key steps in the implementation included building a comprehensive skills matrix tailored to the specific needs of HVAC technicians. Skills Base enabled Trane to standardize skill assessments across different regions, ensuring consistency and reliability. Plans were also made to integrate Skills Base with Trane’s Learning Management System (LMS) and Salesforce, enhancing data utilization and automation.

Skills Base has transformed the way we manage and develop our technicians’ skills. The visibility and consistency it provides are invaluable. Our technicians now have a clear path for growth, and we can deploy them more effectively, improving our overall service quality.

Mike Soucy,
Service Solutions Architect
Commercial HVAC Americas

By partnering with Skills Base, Trane has made significant strides in enhancing its technician training and development programs. The plan moving forward is to continue to expand across Resource Coordinators (Dispatchers) and Project Administrators with a goal of delivering even greater efficiencies and improvements. Taking a skills-first approach is positioning Trane as a leader in technician development within the HVAC industry while also advancing its commitment to sustainability and global change.

The post Trane Enhances Technician Training and Development appeared first on Skills Base.

Enhancing Delaware’s Service Delivery with Skills Management

Nick — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 23:49:10 +0000

Delaware, a global IT and management consulting firm with a presence in 19 countries, faced challenges in managing and standardizing skills across its diverse workforce. With a significant number of interns and new hires, the company needed a consistent and efficient way to document and utilize employee skills. Enter Skills Base, the solution that revolutionized their approach to skills management.

delaware.pro

ICT solutions and services

4600+ Employees

The benefits

Standardized Skills Management: Uniform documentation and assessment of skills across the company.
Efficient Resource Allocation: Automated processes for identifying and scheduling the right resources, reducing manual effort and correspondence.
Improved Competency Measures: Consistent and uniform measurement of staffing competency across locations.
Scalable Solution: Growth in usage from 270 people to 3,700 people in just two years.

The use cases

Resource Allocation

Learning and Development

Career Mobility

The Challenge

Ann, Delivery Manager in Operations at Delaware, has been with the company for 26 years. She experienced firsthand the difficulties in managing resources across multiple locations and ensuring consistent skills documentation. Previously, each location used different methods and descriptions, leading to inefficiencies and inconsistencies in resource allocation.

The Solution

Delaware Corporation implemented Skills Base to streamline and standardize their skills management process. By integrating Skills Base with SAP SuccessFactors, the company was able to automate and centralize skills documentation, making it easier to identify and schedule the right resources for various projects. Ann utilized Skills Base APIs and Power Builder to create analytical reports and manage the administration of Skills Base effectively.

Skills Base has Improved our ability to bid for and win RFPs, and adequately staff customer engagements.

Ann De Sloover, Delivery Manager

Ann De Sloover,
Delivery Manager

Implementation and Onboarding

The implementation of Skills Base involved building a comprehensive skills taxonomy with input from personnel, supervisors, and management. This process standardized skills definitions across all geographies and departments, significantly improving their ability to bid for, win, and staff engagements. Despite initial concerns, the adoption process was smooth, with universal buy-in from management and staff.

Outcomes

The centralized management of skills has enabled Delaware Corporation to respond more efficiently to RFPs, ensure proper staffing, and identify skill gaps across the organization. The skills-based approach has transformed their operations, providing a consistent process for finding and scheduling skilled personnel, ultimately enhancing their service delivery to clients. delaware offers solutions from their three main ecosystems, SAP, Salesforce and Microsoft. Skills Base allows the company to keep a good overview between all of these offerings, certifications from consultants, etc.

Skills Base has empowered Delaware Corporation to revolutionize their skills management, fostering continuous learning and innovation. Thanks to the central management of certificates, the company now has a clear overview of all the certificates that their employees have achieved or will achieve in the near future. This allows them to spot gaps in terms of training very easily and to offer consultants the right guidance in which certificates or trainings they need. By standardizing skills documentation and automating resource allocation, they have achieved significant improvements in efficiency and consistency. Delaware Corporation’s experience with Skills Base underscores the transformative potential of a skills-based approach in the ICT consulting industry.

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Reducing Project Kickoff Times for C1’s Engineering Workforce

Nick — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 13:53:40 +0000

C1, a multifaceted professional services company, empowers customers to grow their businesses in a market increasingly shaped by AI integration, stringent security needs, and the demand for scalable infrastructure. The company faced significant challenges in efficiently managing the diverse skill sets of its engineers. By adopting Skills Base, C1 transformed its approach to skills management, streamlining processes and significantly reducing project kickoff times.

IT Services and IT Consulting

1000 to 5000 Employees

The benefits

Efficient Skills Tracking: Simplified tracking of skills and certifications, reducing the time and effort required for management.
Reduced Project Kickoff Time: Decreased the average time to assign engineers to projects from three days to just 30 minutes.
Enhanced Resource Allocation: Improved ability to quickly find and allocate engineers based on specific skill sets and availability.
Proactive Certification Management: Automated reminders for certification renewals, virtually eliminating the risk of certifications expiring unnoticed.

The use cases

Skills and Certification Tracking

Resource Allocation

The Challenge

Jay Canfield, Director of Professional Services at C1, described the initial struggle with managing skills using an unwieldy Excel spreadsheet. The spreadsheet was difficult to update, prone to errors, and not scalable for the company’s growing needs. C1 required a robust, centralized system to track and manage the skills of their engineers efficiently.

The Solution

Skills Base provided the perfect solution with its comprehensive and intuitive platform. C1 transitioned from a basic prosumer version to the full enterprise version of Skills Base, complete with single sign-on and extensive customization options. This upgrade allowed C1 to effectively track and manage skills, certifications, and project assignments.

Implementation

The transition to Skills Base was seamless and well-received across various practices within C1. Jay and his team tailored the platform to their needs, creating a skills matrix that facilitated easy tracking and management of skills. The platform’s flexibility allowed different practices to customize skills according to their specific requirements.

Skills Base has significantly reduced the time required for project kickoffs. What used to take us three days to assign engineers to projects now takes only 30 minutes. This efficiency has not only saved us time but also allowed us to serve our clients faster and better.

Jay Canfield,
Director of Professional Services

Outcomes

The centralized management of skills has enabled C1 to respond more efficiently to client needs, ensuring that the right engineers are assigned to the right projects promptly. The skills-based approach has also improved overall project outcomes and customer satisfaction, fostering a more efficient and productive work environment.

Skills Base has empowered C1 to revolutionize their skills management, enhancing the management and development of their global workforce. The platform’s simplicity and comprehensive capabilities have enabled the company to streamline operations, improve resource allocation, and ensure continuous learning and certification compliance. This case study highlights the significant impact of Skills Base in driving efficiency and productivity at C1.

With Skills Base, we have automated reminders for certification renewals, which has virtually eliminated the risk of certifications expiring unnoticed. This proactive management ensures that we maintain our partner statuses and avoid losing valuable certifications. It’s been a game-changer for our compliance and operational efficiency.

Jay Canfield,
Director of Professional Services

The post Reducing Project Kickoff Times for C1’s Engineering Workforce appeared first on Skills Base.

How a Top 4 global accounting firm is tackling the Cyber Security Skills Gap

Nick — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 05:00:39 +0000

The US-based Cyber Security division at one of the largest global accounting and professional services firms has been growing at an unprecedented rate. From hundreds of employees a few years ago, to over a thousand in 2021.

It was the North American Cyber division Principal that advocated a skills-based approach within the organization. His goal was to find a way to measure, track, and report on skills data in a scalable and agile way to better understand the Cyber Security team’s skill gaps and strengths.

Before implementing Skills Base, a spreadsheet-based tool was used to track skills, and evaluate employees on their competencies. But as their skills taxonomy continued to grow at an exponential rate and a more dynamic and granular approach to skills tracking was needed, spreadsheets couldn’t keep up.

“Skills Base hits the sweet spot in tracking the granularity of skills needed, in a scalable and dynamic way to keep up with the pace of the Cyber Security industry”

Principal, Cyber Security

Having a centralized view of skills data across the division has meant that Cyber Security skills gaps and strengths can be easily analyzed and reported on. This means that it has become a key data source for supporting many people-driven business decisions from hiring and recruitment, training, and internal mobility through to resource allocation.

“The way we’re now tracking and managing skills data is being used to make critical business decisions. We wouldn’t be able to do what we’re doing now strategically without Skills Base and a skills-based approach.“

Principal, Cyber Security

There were a few “must-haves” when it came to selecting a skills management tool. It needed to be a cloud based solution which implemented globally leading security and data management measures. It needed to work on any device and provide an intuitive interface for employee skill evaluations. It needed to support Single Sign On through Microsoft Active Directory and easily integrate with the existing SAP Success Factors tech stack.

With the successful implementation of Skills Base and subsequent onboarding of employees, the Cyber Security division has been able to achieve significant outcomes across 5 key areas of the business.

Hiring at Scale to close the cyber security skills gap

As the business has gone through exponential growth, there simply weren’t enough people in the organization to upskill, or reskill. By using Skills Base to help identify the Cyber Security skills gap within the organization, they have been able to provide hyper-targeted skill requirements to the HR and talent selection teams.

“We’re using Skills Base to support the hiring of another 100 staff to support our rapid growth. The data is helping me go to my executive team to justify the expense and more importantly the skills needed for the business to remain competitive, and resilient.“

Principal, Cyber Security

Using skill strengths to deliver more customer value

The consulting division is another rapidly growing part of the organization. Many existing customers, and new customers rely on the Cyber Security team to provide cutting edge innovation across strategy, cloud migration, risk mitigation, and much more.

The experience management team is in charge of understanding customer requirements, and then finding people within the organization to deliver projects at the highest quality. Before Skills Base, the team would have to trawl through CVs that might be five years old or rely on the knowledge of certain managers.

Skills Base has helped to reduce the sense of “tribal knowledge”. Rather than the understanding of skills being locked away in individuals’ heads, managers now have a central location to source skilled, Cyber Security candidates from.

“Our Experience management team can now find the granular skills of our Cyber Security team needed to win more contracts and deliver the cutting edge innovation our customers expect from us.“

Principal, Cyber Security

Skills Base has provided a skills-based approach to resource allocation that can identify the latest skills in the Cyber Security practice at the granularity needed to deliver the cutting edge innovation for their customers.

Targeted Training to Close the Cyber Security Skill Gap

The Cyber Security team has consistently been committed to training and learning and development. This has not only been to improve the employee experience and career outcomes, but also ensure that the division has the skilled professionals required to deliver on the business strategy.

“We’ve been able to understand the skills gaps of our technical areas, and collaboratively work with our team to better define their training requirements for the job, and for future business skill needs.“

Principal, Cyber Security

Skills Base has allowed the Cyber Security team to become more focused in their training efforts. A detailed understanding of skills has helped to create training pathways that are bespoke to each employee. These trends can then be objectively discussed during performance reviews so that employees and managers can be held accountable in an objective way.

Training Investment strategy aligned to the skill gaps

The executive team understands and supports the need to have the right skills in the business now, and an understanding of the skills needed for future success.

With Skills Base, the Cyber Security leaders are able to benchmark the current skills profile of the organization, and then use that data to support budget planning across training, recruitment and L&D.

“I am able to link the revenue generating project skill needs, with the competency levels across the Cyber Security division. This shows the skills gaps, and gives me the data needed to secure an adequate training budget.”

Principal, Cyber Security

This has not only provided another data point to support an increase in investment, but can be directly aligned to strategy and improving business success.

Employee experience & Internal Mobility

In some cases employees within the Cyber Security team were overlooked when it came to their skill set and interests to develop in certain areas. They would often stick to what they were hired for, and be restricted by their degrees or qualifications.

Skills Base has allowed more visibility into not only the skill levels, but also the skill interests of each employee. This means that people have more control over their own progression within the Cyber Security practice.

This has not only driven greater diversity across the talent pool, it has also created opportunities to move freely within the practice area and create cross functional teams.

“We can find the needle in the haystack. Now, we can support employees better, give them the training they want, and give them opportunities that are more meaningful to them.“

Principal, Cyber Security

Visibility in skills has also opened the doors to greater collaboration across the business where it’s easier to find mentors and coaches who are skilled in certain areas.

It's time to understand, measure and act on your cyber security skill gaps.

The post How a Top 4 global accounting firm is tackling the Cyber Security Skills Gap appeared first on Skills Base.

How Vodafone Retail NZ reduced training time from 6 months to 3 months using Skills Base

Nick — Tue, 10 Nov 2020 04:10:52 +0000

Andy Hamilton is a Training and Development Manager as well as a seasoned Retail Specialist with over 15 years’ experience working at Vodafone NZ and more recently Vodafone Retail New Zealand. His main focus for his career has been on building a learning and development culture to help people grow within the business.

Before Andy reached out to Skills Base, skills and competencies were generally managed in a manual, spreadsheet orientated way. This caused training to be slower with limited visibility into the competency of his team. Career development was also open to individual bias and subjectivity where HR didn’t have an understanding of who was ready to be upskilled next and so some employees would often slip through the cracks.

Industry

Retail

Users

400+

Location

New Zealand

“Skills Base has helped us get our new hires productive sooner, ultimately reducing training time from 6 months to 3 months.”

Andy Hamilton

Vodafone NZ

Implementing a cloud-based skills management system

By implementing Skills Base, Andy and his team have been able to move away from Excel and pen and paper to a centralized skills management system. Having this in place enables a holistic view of the organization that anyone can access. Everyone from the CEO down can log in at any time and view the performance of an individual employee, team, role or store location.

Having this greater view of the skills and competencies of each individual also allows any new employee or existing team member looking to upskill or reskill to be trained a lot faster. This means Andy is now able to get the highest performers into the right roles quickly and at the same time get the most out of his team.

Not only does this enable far more targeted and efficient career development, the organization can move away from the traditional vertical career development process. Staff can select roles they’re interested in and can progress towards them horizontally and diagonally, giving them a lot more freedom and control over their career development.

At a planning level Andy can now also take advantage of the Skills Matrix to easily spot the skills gaps and opportunities. For instance he can now immediately see areas in need of development for specific store locations and can get his sales coaches to review the skills matrix to identify employee skill gaps before they visit a store.

“We’re able to use the Skills Matrix to immediately see Skills Gaps and areas of development. This has allowed our sales coaches to review the Skills Matrix and build a development plan before they meet with employees.”

Andy Hamilton

Vodafone NZ

How has Andy and Vodafone Retail NZ benefited from Skills base?

When Andy and his team hires someone into the business, from day one they get inducted into Skills Base and are given the skills they need to work through. By doing this they can get staff ready and productive sooner, and have been able to reduce the initial training from 6 months down to 3 months.

Skills Base also provides a source of truth that anyone can access and focus on. Meaning everyone has ownership and can be self directed in their learning and development outcomes which can be now done in a more effective and accelerated way.

“With Skills Base we no longer see career development in a traditional vertical sense. Having the skills data readily available for anyone, staff can select roles they’re interested in and can progress towards them horizontally and diagonally, giving them a lot more freedom and control over their own career journey.’

Andy Hamilton

Vodafone NZ

How did Andy get started with Skills Base?

When seeking a skills management system Andy had a clear goal. He knew the ideal platform would have to be flexible enough to accommodate Vodafone Retail NZ’s existing data structure, including mapping skills, roles, teams and locations. The platform would also need to be able to update this data constantly as a part of the new team members’ onboarding process.

As Andy began evaluating Skills Base he took advantage of a free trial account where he spent time to initially test and play around with its core features. This gave him the ability to get his head around the platform quickly and was able to see the benefits and how it could be utilized.

By working closely with our customer success team he was then able to ensure that Skills Base would be a good fit for Vodafone Retail NZ. He was also able to learn from us about some skills management best practices that we’ve picked up over the last few years.

Kudos to Andy for innovating and looking to better support his team around their learning and development goals and build a culture that Vodafone Retail NZ can be proud of.

The post How Vodafone Retail NZ reduced training time from 6 months to 3 months using Skills Base appeared first on Skills Base.

How Ellucian used Skills Base to drive more value to customers

Nick — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 02:58:39 +0000

Ellucian is the world’s leading provider of higher education software and services. With more than 2,500 institutions in nearly 50 countries, Ellucian enhances the education experience of over 18 million students. Ellucian Technology Management Services (ETM) specializes in helping customers manage the information technology that delivers core services to students.

Industry

Education

Users

500+

Location

Virginia, United States

Skills throughout the ETM team are wide and varied, and employees are distributed over different geographies. When a team member needed to draw on expertise from their colleagues they would generally have to approach their manager or send an email out to the entire department asking for assistance.

Within the organization, we probably have an expert that can solve any problem. We needed a way to connect that expertise with staff at the customer level who needed it” John Wilder, Director, Application Services

"We needed a way to connect expertise with staff at the customer level who needed it"

John Wilder

Director Application Services

Ellucian had some skill tracking capabilities, but there was no formal tool or process for skills management.

Above all else, Ellucian required a solution with a “zero learning curve” and intuitive user interface. It had to be simple and not require an extensive training program to implement. The solution also had to be specific to skills management and not include ancillary functionality that would increase its overall complexity and implementation cost.

A number of solutions were evaluated. Some did not adequately address the requirements, and others were found to be too cumbersome for the task.

Ellucian settled on Skills Base for its ease of use, effectiveness, and simple deployment. “The fact that Skills Base is a SaaS application made it very easy for us to deploy”.

Skills Base has empowered individual team members with the capability to reach across the organization when confronted with a unique challenge for a customer. This has helped lower internal barriers including perceived social barriers.

“Skills Base has helped us better leverage the entire organization in delivering value to our customers. It’s helping our teams work more cohesively by allowing team members to more easily connect with each other, even when they may be located in different parts of the world”.

“Skills Base has helped us better leverage the entire organization in delivering value to our customers. "

John Wilder

Director Application Services

Ellucian has been able to roll the service out to over 500 employees without having to run formal end user training.

“The Skills Base assessment process is very simple. We’ve had really no issues. Everyone has said ‘This is simple; We understand this’”. The service has also been reliable and robust. “Skills Base support has been outstanding, and from a system stability standpoint there have been no issues.”

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