How Canpack built a single skills language across 19 sites and 11 countries

A tribal knowledge problem at global scale

With 19 production sites and 9,000 direct employees speaking eight different languages, Canpack, a global beverage packaging manufacturer, needed a consistent way to manage skills and training. The company’s approach relied on local expertise and informal knowledge transfer, which made it hard to keep standards aligned across regions.

“The way we were doing the training was basically sending many of our most experienced people to the sites to start up new employees. There would be a ‘tribal’ knowledge transfer; it wasn’t standardized,” said Adilson Ferreira, Group Training Director at Canpack. “For future endeavors, it was necessary to have a standard mechanism to track competencies and make them visible. At that point, we found AG5,” Ferreira said.

Creating a global library

Using AG5, Canpack built a centralized skills library, but the process of getting there required more than just uploading data.

“As an example, worldwide we used to have 600 skills for electricians in all of the various Excels,” Ferreira said. “By creating the global skills library, we reduced that to 92.”

That consolidation didn’t happen top-down. Teams from multiple countries and departments came together to agree on naming and structure. This was a deliberate choice that paid off during rollout.

There is a huge benefit in synergy locally and worldwide.

Adilson Ferreira

Group Training Director, Canpack

“In the end, we were able to simplify the titles and the number of skills,” Ferreira said.

Implementation began in three plants – in the UK, Colombia, and the Netherlands – before expanding organically.

Measurable improvements

The rollout created global consistency that showed up immediately in day-to-day operations.

“The result is that all sites are speaking the same language,” Ferreira said. “Now, if a mentor visits one factory and the next month he visits another one in another country, he finds the same set of skills everywhere.”

AG5 also changed how employees engage with their own development. Where training choices used to happen informally or not at all, they now happen in structured conversations between employees and supervisors, prompted by visibility that didn’t exist before.

“These conversations with supervisors are now taking place more frequently because of AG5, where the employees have been made visible their next step, and they can clearly see which training they need to get there.”

We don’t want employees to go rogue and just choose one training, but to have that conversation in a very intentional way.

Adilson Ferreira

Group Training Director, Canpack

Finding expertise across a global network has become straightforward, too. When managers need someone to cover a shift, the answer is in the system.

“One of the ways people are using the system is by looking for experts. When somebody isn’t working tomorrow, they search for another employee with the same or similar skill set that can replace them,” Ferreira said.

A collaborative approach

The success of the rollout, according to Ferreira, came from involving teams directly rather than mandating change from above. The pitch to employees was honest about the disruption and clear about the benefit.

“Choosing between Excel and a digital tool that allows you to see things very clearly was not a hard sell,” he said.

For a global manufacturer operating across so many sites and in multiple languages, that approach turned a change management project into something that actually stuck.