Hanson introduces an intuitive training management process

Hanson is the UK’s leading supplier of heavy building materials to the construction industry. It produces aggregates (crushed rock, sand and gravel), ready-mixed and precast concrete, asphalt and cement-related materials and a range of building products including clay bricks and roof tiles, lightweight and dense concrete blocks and concrete pavers. Hanson is part of the HeidelbergCement Group, which employs over 53,000 people across five continents. HeidelbergCement is the global leader in aggregates and has leading positions in cement, concrete and heavy building products.

Like many large enterprises, Hanson’s UK business has expanded partly through organic growth and partly through a series of corporate acquisitions. As a result of these acquisitions, the company inherited a wide range of IT systems that support different departments and functional areas. As part of a major IT consolidation strategy, the company decided to standardise on SAP ERP applications to manage its core business, while retaining best-of-breed tactical solutions for certain specialist functions.

“Although SAP will ultimately support most of our main business processes, we are not planning to move the entire business onto a single SAP system,” explains Derek Winskill, IT Director at Hanson UK. “Moreover, our transition to SAP is likely to take several years, so there will still be a number of different IT systems in production for the foreseeable future.

“However, regardless of the complexity of the underlying system landscape, we want to make sure that users across the business can get their work done easily. We wanted to find a way to orchestrate the different systems into simple, end-to-end business processes, so that users can get what they need from our IT systems without needing special technical expertise or understanding how the landscape actually fits together underneath.”

Masking complexity with business process management
Hanson decided to implement IBM Business Process Manager to provide a layer of abstraction between the user and the underlying systems. The solution enables Hanson to model, deploy and monitor new business processes by orchestrating services from multiple existing IT systems to provide a seamless experience for end-users.

“Business process management initiatives can be daunting if you try to do everything at once,” explains Derek Winskill. “We decided to start with a single project, which would help us learn more about the capabilities of the solution and gain a better understanding of how we could deploy it on a larger scale in future.”

Building a better learning management process
The objective for the initial project was to re-engineer Hanson’s learning management processes. The company’s existing learning management solution was relatively cumbersome and had a reputation for unreliability, which caused problems for the HR department and for managers across the business.

“Our existing system was not intuitive at all, and managers didn’t like using it,” explains Clare Mayo, HR Director – Hanson UK. “It was difficult to find out which employees had attended which training courses, and there was no real distinction between mandatory training – which is required for health and safety reasons or to meet other regulatory requirements – and developmental training.”

Gareth Price, Technical Director – Hanson Cement, adds: “Where possible, all training requests for the following year need to be submitted before the start of the annual budgeting period so that the HR and Health and Safety teams can set the budget. But because the old system was so difficult to use, a lot of managers used to leave this to the last minute, and then the system would become overloaded and unreliable. We were very keen to put a new, more user-friendly system in place so that managers would start using it as part of their day-to-day work, instead of putting it off because they saw it as a chore.”

A project team based on partnership
Once the learning management system had been identified as the best candidate for the first implementation, Hanson put together a project team which consisted of staff from IT, HR, Health and Safety and managers from the main business divisions. Consultants and developers from Axispoint, an IBM Premier Business Partner with considerable experience in business process management projects, were also part of the team.

“The Axispoint team have really played a key role in the success of our business process management initiative so far,” comments Derek Winskill. “Throughout the project, they gave us good advice on how best to utilise the IBM tools, and they fully understood that the objective was to provide a solution that met the needs of the business users. Another factor that really helped is that their consultants had a background in HR, so they understood exactly what was required and were able to speak the same language as the project stakeholders.”

“For the development of the solution they used an agile approach, and provided a number of iterations to keep the rest of the project team involved and help them understand how the solution was taking shape. As a result, the business got exactly what it wanted – a solution that allows managers to manage training requirements for all their staff within a few mouse-clicks.”

Simple design brings dividends
The solution provides a simple user interface that shows each type of user the information that is most relevant to his or her particular role. A line manager, for example, sees a list of all the employees that report directly to him or her, as well as the training courses they have taken and the courses that are mandatory for their specific role. If any mandatory training is missing or additional developmental training would benefit a specific employee, the manager can select the appropriate courses via a simple ‘shopping basket’ interface. When the basket is submitted, the mandatory courses are automatically approved and sent through to the budgeting system, while the developmental courses enter a workflow which sends them to the HR department for approval or rejection.

“It is much better than the old system,” says Gareth Price. “We had been waiting for a system that everyone can use easily. Now it’s only a matter of three or four clicks and you get what you want. The whole process is at least twice as quick as before. If you are a manager who has a large team reporting to you, you used to have to look up each employee separately, which took a lot of management time. Now you can see everyone’s training status in seconds, so it’s a huge improvement.”

Greater visibility and standardisation
From the point of view of the HR department, the solution provides monthly reports on exceptions to the standard process – for example, urgent requests that come in after the budgeting deadline, new starters who need basic mandatory training as soon as possible, and people who have been booked in for training but cannot attend. This makes it easier to flex the budget to meet unplanned requests and respond more effectively to the needs of the business. This central reporting function also makes it easier to gather data for health and safety audits.

“Another benefit is greater standardisation,” explains Clare Mayo. “One of the first parts of the project was to create a set of matrices for all the different job roles within the organisation and decide exactly which courses were mandatory for each role. Previously, this decision would have been made on a departmental basis, at the discretion of individual managers. Now, we have a completely standardised approach: on the one hand, we can be sure that all employees get the training they need, while on the other, we know we are not spending budget on unnecessary courses.”

Proving the concept for business process management
Derek Winskill adds: “Taking a broader view, the project has demonstrated that the business process management approach provides the best of both worlds. It allows us to keep our best-of-breed systems and coordinate them with our new SAP environment, as well as providing a graceful way to retire some of our legacy platforms. At the same time, it gives the business a much easier and more intuitive way to interact with IT systems and creates a more seamless and comprehensive process-based approach to everyday work. There is more automation between different stages of the process, which means greater efficiency and less scope for human error.”

The next step for Hanson and Axispoint is to integrate a content management solution into the business process management platform, which will serve as a valuable resource for future projects. It will also add to the functionality of the learning management system, since it will enable all the training documentation and certificates to be held in a single central repository – replacing a large volume of paperwork.

A notable success
“The whole project has been a great success, and the solution has already been enthusiastically adopted by the business,” says Clare Mayo. “It’s remarkable how easy the rollout has been – there has been no need for face-to-face training, and we’ve had very few calls to the helpdesk. It really shows that by engaging the business in the design and development, we have built a solution that meets everyone’s needs.”

Derek Winskill concludes: “On the evidence of the learning management system, the future of business process management at Hanson is bright, and we are keen to work with Axispoint on further projects that will bring even greater benefits to the business.”