77% Improvement in New Hire Time to Proficiency

Businesses that produce products or services by following complex processes are at high risk when employees with tribal knowledge leave and there is no system to capture the information. If only paper and shoulder-to-shoulder training are available to train replacements, the risk becomes more severe and can cost millions in productivity, waste, and employee retention.

Outcomes:

• Reduced time to proficiency of new hires from 538 days to 125 days
• Employees are more autonomous, freeing other employees to focus on their work
• Reaction plans take a fraction of the time to execute
• Tribal knowledge from retiring employees is captured easily for future access

“The transformation with Acadia has given me my life back. I don’t get calls in the middle of the night or on weekends anymore. Everyone knows to go to Acadia for answers.”

– Lead Trainer

New Capabilities

• Reduction in new hire time to proficiency
• Improved visibility of employee skill assessments and career paths
• Increased autonomy during training
• Ability to track skills progressions with task lists and quizzing
• Reaction plans accessible on the floor in seconds

One of our clients is a manufacturer of consumer goods with a highly automated facility. Their workforce is largely comprised of maintenance technicians and electricians who keep the plant running smoothly. The company has an enviable retention rate and the original employees who started when the facility opened in the mid-1980s have only recently begun to retire. This created an immediate and alarming skills gap. Team members with 30+ years of experience were being replaced by new technicians just beginning their careers.

Because the company hadn’t experienced much turnover previously, their training program wasn’t designed for a large influx of new people. Training consisted of splitting time between reviewing manuals in the facility’s library and shadowing technicians on the floor. The library was entirely paper-based and required technicians to leave the floor in search of information. Training on the floor was also cumbersome. Without work instructions or job aids, they needed to wait until a machine broke down to learn how to fix it. None of this met their urgent need to replace retiring team members.

They turned to Acadia to transform their paper-based system into a dynamic knowledge repository where the entire workforce can find the information they need, the moment they need it.

Now they have a structured onboarding path with step-by-step, on-the-job training for technicians that allows new hires to work autonomously. SOPs are delivered digitally with videos and other job aids that employees can access on the plant floor. SOPs can also be instantly converted into trackable checklists. Tracked task lists, quizzes, and evaluations allow managers to review every team member’s proficiency in their required skills.

Acadia is used to set up training paths to teach team members the skills they need. And rather than waiting for a machine to break down to show a technician what to do, they can create procedures in Acadia that help guide them through the protocols instead. It’s allowed trainers to drastically reduce the time it takes to onboard new technicians and make them an intermediate user requiring no assistance. It used to take 500+ days. With Acadia, they’ve reduced it to 125!

That’s just the benefit the company has experienced. For employees, the new system has made a world of difference as well.

One of the company’s lead trainers is a single father who used to be on call 24/7. Now that technicians can go to Acadia to find the answers to their questions, he says he’s gotten his life back. Before, he’d have to come in on weekends if team members couldn’t remember what button to push. Now, they have the answers in the palm of their hands.