How KLM Cargo saves 35% time with instant skills data across all compliance functions

A personnel number, and then nothing

KLM Cargo moves freight across the world. At any given moment, roughly 3,000 employees and contractors must be correctly trained, certified, and compliant, provably and without exception.

Gert Mijnders, Knowledge Center Compliance Manager at KLM Cargo, is responsible for demonstrating that. For a long time, he worked with systems that made that task far more difficult than it needed to be.

“Our old system simply gave out a personnel number from SAP and that was it,” Mijnders said. “I then had to start digging into our various systems to find the answers to all my questions. Who are they? What’s their department code? What’s their cost center code? What position are they going to be filling?

And which training programs do I need to arrange for them?”

On top of that, staff take courses outside the company and on the job, none of which fed automatically into any central record. Excel spreadsheets filled the gap, poorly.

“We were continually entering data, making comparisons, and generating reports, not to forget correcting all the errors,” Mijnders said.

Audited every single month

The stakes for getting this wrong were high. KLM Cargo is audited monthly by the Dutch Human Environment & Transport Inspectorate, the General Intelligence & Security Service of the Netherlands, Delta Air Lines, and IATA. Each one wants complete and accurate training records.

“I have to be able to demonstrate, without fail, that every KLM Cargo employee or temporary worker is fully trained in every aspect of their job, and that this is fully documented,” Mijnders said.

That requirement – without fail, every month, across 3,000 people – made a spreadsheet-based approach to skills management untenable. Mijnders needed a unified dashboard combining compliance and learning, integrated with SAP, Moodle, and Cornerstone, with expiry alerts and powerful search across the entire global workforce.

My staff  got to grips with AG5’s software really quickly because it’s highly intuitive. Simply click and drag.

Gert Mijnders

Knowledge Center Compliance Manager, KLM Cargo

The data hub at the center of everything

AG5 became the skills data hub connecting KLM Cargo’s existing systems rather than replacing them. Manual data entry was eliminated, and qualification records are now current, searchable, and reliable.

“Now that we’re using AG5’s software, I know everything’s correct. I can filter by employee to see instantly whose qualifications will be expiring in three months’, six months’, or two years’ time,” Mijnders said.

Planning training for commercial staff in Asia, for example, no longer requires a conversation with regional managers. The answer is already in the system.

I used to spend weeks preparing for a compliance audit of our training records. Now I just open AG5 and all our skills data is already there.

Gert Mijnders

Knowledge Center Compliance Manager, KLM Cargo

What 35% time savings actually looks like

Across the organization, more than a third of the time previously spent on compliance work has been reclaimed from manual entry, error correction, report generation, and pre-audit preparation. This was work that produced no insight, only maintenance, resulting in a great deal of wasted effort.

With that burden gone, compliance at KLM Cargo now more efficiently provides a clear, reliable picture of a 3,000-person global workforce, available on demand, and accurate enough to hand to a regulator without hesitation.

For an operation audited 12 times a year by four different bodies, that’s what it takes to keep flying.