Coty reduces new hire onboarding time by 57%

How did you onboard new hires before, and how has that improved since implementing Poka’s Connected Worker app?

Before we began using Poka, operators took a two-week course where we trained them on how to use our systems, how to log into computers, how to navigate around, how to order components for the line, stuff like that. It also covered our general safety and quality requirements, what their responsibilities are, and other things linked to the production floor. Then they would get a print-out exam that our trainers would have to grade. It was very much an old-school, classroom learning environment. After that, they would get a week of shadowing on the floor, followed by a formal, on-the-floor assessment proving that they could perform the tasks.

We now do full onboarding in Poka. All our PowerPoint modules, work instructions, one-point lessons, and other training content are now available in Poka as part of the skills operators have to learn. So, we don’t need to have trainers dedicated full-time in the classroom giving the training. Instead, the management team sends us a notification that a new employee is starting, we give them a Poka log-in, and new hires review all training content in Poka. We still do the floor assessment afterwards, but basically everything before then is done in Poka. It's fully autonomous now. We then provide managers with statistics and feedback on how they're performing during their onboarding and during their skills.

Since moving our training to Poka, we’ve reduced the time to onboard new-hires from 84 hours to 36 hours. New hires are now trained 4 hours a day over nine days. We’ve also seen our RFT (right-first-time) assessment scores jump from 60% to 90%.

How is your training more engaging and effective now?

I used to have a ton of statistics on the effectiveness of classroom training versus on-the-job training versus hands-on, hands-off. Everyone has a different learning preference, so it's hard to say with all certainty, But what I do know is that our assessment and exam scores have gone up since we began using Poka.

And I think that’s attributed to their focus. After sitting there for two to three hours at a time and getting the same person speaking to you about a different subject, eventually you’re gonna get bored and distracted. You’re going to stop paying attention. It’s almost too much information for one person to absorb at one time.

But when you do the training in Poka, those four hours are broken up into different modules. So, it will be completely different subjects and it forces the operator to bounce around in terms of ideas and what they're learning in a given day. I'm not just sitting, talking to them for four hours straight. And then they get four hours on the floor to end the day where they have a shadowing checklist they complete, linked to the four hours of training that they did earlier in the day. So, it’s far better for them. They're far more alert.

What has the feedback been like from operators? How do they like using Poka?

We have a feedback form directly in Poka and we’ve had 70 people fill out the form over the last year or so for different types of skills. And we consistently get really, really good feedback about the solution from operators. They said that the training platform is great. The information is very good. The presentations are very informative and the time allotted for the training is just right.

Also, in speaking to people in general on the floor, people really love having this tool. They feel like it's much more applicable to the type of learning that they want to perform. We’re at an age where if someone wants to learn something, they go to Google, type it in, and a YouTube video pops up showing them exactly what they want to know. That's exactly the kind of application we wanted when we came to Poka. Everything is quickly searchable. People have information at their fingertips. That's the feedback that I'm hearing.

I’m also excited because we’re rolling out iPads. When we first went live with Poka, we were using desktops on the floor. Now operators will be able to scan the QR code on the equipment with their iPad and then access information about that piece of equipment and get technical training on it.

How are you more agile now, and how does that help you to keep up with current and future training needs?

The year before we implemented Poka, we did 15 onboarding sessions, so we were averaging one per month. Training was 96 hours long, so our trainer basically spent two full weeks of their time dedicated to the classroom regardless if there was multiple people or a single person in the training. During that time, the trainer wasn’t developing new training which is why we had such a big gap in our technical training plan. But it was required because we were hiring so frequently. We couldn’t have new hires on the floor waiting to be trained. So, Poka enables us to be more agile. We can get new hires set up quickly and they can access their skills and training content on day one.

I don't need to have a trainer on-site and ready. I don't need to organize it. I don't need to make sure that all of the production managers are working on hiring operators at the same time. There's so many benefits that we've seen from this that I could go on and on. But the main thing is it’s flexible for production. It’s flexible for the training staff. Our time is being freed up so that we're able to continue to develop extensive training in the right areas where we had gaps before.

How long did it take to build new skills in Poka and roll them out to operators?

We didn't just transfer our existing content, or copy and paste PowerPoints slides over to Poka. We rebuilt the training using the existing content as a reference. We created 70 new skills from scratch that were a 100% video-based, quiz-based, etc. Which is why it took us eight months to build the program. The first five or six months, we had to manage both things at once. So we were still performing the two-week in-classroom training while we were building all of our skills in Poka. And then there was a three to four-month stretch where we shut down the old training and made sure that we were staffed appropriately. That enabled us to stay 100% focused on developing the new system and have two full-time trainers dedicated to the project.

How many skills do you currently have in Poka and what are your plans for getting SMEs to help create new ones in the future?

We have over a hundred skills already built into the system so far, and we can easily add more. Over the last few months, we have been working on technical training. We’re basically mapping out all our technical training needs. Examples of this would be how to perform a flush on our equipment, how to change pistons out, how to check nozzles. It's really equipment-focused training, which is really what Poka was intended to do and is strong at.

We’re sourcing some support functions from the production areas to help us develop new content and giving them training on using video editing software. The idea is that we want to develop a Poka committee here on site, and everyone that's a member can go in and create materials, like a skills development video, etc. versus it just being one person's full-time job. For now we have four or five people. And then as we continue to expand into additional functions, we'll probably add a few of our planning team members, quality team members, etc. to build the training for their appropriate departments. So it's giving all subject matter experts the ability to create training content.

How is the skills matrix helping you to better track operators’ skills and improve your quality audit scores?

Poka’s skills matrix gives us complete visibility over the status of each operator’s skills, the last time they completed each skill, and what their scores were. We also have the ability to automatically assign new skills to people. We don’t have to manually search and figure out who is where and make sure that certain people are included in training versus not. Because everything is role-based now, it's really easy for people to get their skills automatically assigned to them. I can push a notification to say, “Hey, go complete your skill at your earliest availability.”

So, it's been extremely easy for managers to help drive the skill plan. The two trainers were basically in charge of our Excel matrix and they had to go in once a month and look through everything manually, which meant that there were always gaps. We never knew when training was completed because it was all manually signed off on a piece of paper. So, to figure out who was actually at the training, they had to go back and pull the paper form. So it's made everything in terms of traceability, far, far, far better. And I think that that should show in our quality audit next year. We're on-track to be better than in any previous years.

What key performance indicators (KPIs) are you using to measure the success of your Poka investment?

Our initial project goal was to automate onboarding, so I feel like we've been pretty successful with reducing training time by 57% and improving assessment scores by 50%. So we didn't have very deep targets. Now that we’ve accomplished that goal we're going to continue to develop the system, and implement some new goals that will be more linked to the capability of our operators. There should be some kind of traceability between the operator's performance and training. We should be able to know that when we're training on Poka, we saw an operator capable of running a line at 85% OEE with 0% loss.