20/20 vision & extra cheese
by Karine (Boyer) Nguyen
London, September 20th, 2018. Since the beginning of 2016 I have had the privilege of working very closely with an Italian shipbuilding company. Apart from really enjoying the change of pace in Northern Italy from my home in London, I have also come to realise and appreciate the profound impact that we made.
Karine (Boyer) Nguyen, Training Services Manager at TecSurge, is based in the UK. Karine has a total of 16 years international experience with software and EPC companies. Her focus is on Engineering Applications and the diversity of her experience adds detailed technical knowledge, engineering methodology, piping software handling, site surveying and team management.
Let me set the context: our end customer was based in Trieste, Italy, and has become the fourth largest player in the world in its sector. The company builds both commercial and military vessels.
TecSurge’s involvement was to implement their catalogue database that will be used later to design ships in 3D and purchase the needed material.
A few weeks after the beginning of the project, the customer requested to involve a third party in the scope as this third party would eventually oversee the database maintenance and needed to get familiar with it and its construction. A couple of extra cheese pizza dinners later, we came up with a plan by assigning some tasks to them. But the problem was: they had no SmartPlant Reference Data experience and needed to be trained.
The initial idea was to organise a classroom training which would have involved travelling costs and pausing in the implementation progress for a week as both trainees and trainer would have been fully busy in class.
Trying to avoid wasting time and money, I had an idea: introduce and leverage TecSurge Academy, our learning content production system!
Hand in hand we then developed interactive training material tailored to match the work processes the third party was supposed to follow for this project. This solution had the advantage of allowing the trainees to attend the class on their own pace, stop and resume whenever their workload needed it and the trainer was still free to work on the implementation while remaining available for any questions the trainee may have.
TecSurge Academy approach was gladly accepted by the customer who could see a gain in the project budget and progress.
Together with our experts in Singapore and the Philippines, we brought years of real-world experience using engineering applications on projects to the table. We provided Learning Content Production for users by users. Our Academy expertise allowed us to produce detailed content with clear explanations, proper illustrations and assessments.
We prepared the materials using Adobe’s market-leading Captivate software and produced final deliverables in the industry-standard SCORM format, hostable within any standard LMS solution.
In this case, the trainees used our online Academy platform to attend this class and 2-3 days later they could start working on the implementation.
The results were great, which is why I am writing this blog. The project was not impacted, and the feedback was excellent. Cherry on the cake (or rather ‘extra cheese on the pizza’): now that the training material was prepared, the company can still benefit from it allowing their staff, partner network and vendors to use the material. Transparent reporting gives management the visibility of knowledge levels and achievements within the company.
This new approach delivered significant benefits in the form of providing our customer with a superior level of management visibility and simplifying knowledge transfer to their new hires, sub-contractors, suppliers and partners.
If you’re interested in discussing how TecSurge can help your business, please leave me a comment below or contact us today.