Energy Consultation

We now have zero stress when the Accreditation Council conducts its monthly audit.

Which problem did you want to solve?

We are an innovative certification and inspection body for pressurised equipment. As we certify our clients, it is only logical that our staff also require many accreditations. To work for us, an employee must have various competences on different professional levels. We have a total of 270 competences. Therefore, we need a good skills management system.

How did we do this in the past?

We used to keep track of competences for all employees in the system I-talent. A system that is not built for competence management. We always had to supplement the data because the system lacked certain functionalities. That is why we used to export the competences to Excel. Things often went wrong when doing so.

How did spreadsheets make these problems worse?

Formulas sometimes ended up in Excel incorrectly. Adding new employees was terribly error-prone due to the complexity of formulas in Excel. When you have to track 270 competences per employee, this equals a huge amount of work and the uncertainty of whether things are going well is nerve-racking.

Why were you so stressed?

We were stressed out by our inadequate way of managing skills, as our staff must be and remain accredited in order to do anything at all. In addition, they are audited by the Accreditation Council every month, so everyone was in a state every month because they were afraid that the audit would show that competences were missing or that they were not properly listed in Excel. Plus employees did not have access to their own data so they could not check how they were doing regarding accreditations or whether everything was listed in the system properly.

What is the situation like now?

Now that we are working with AG5, we are no longer stressed about Council audits. We now have one user-friendly management system. During a tour of the company, everything adds up and our employees will know about that in advance. Certificates are linked to competences, so they can be accessed directly during audits for the Council to check.

One of the reasons that everything is now in place is that failing formulas and having to fix them is a thing of the past, as we no longer need to create exports and use Excel.

Have you noticed any other benefits?

New employees can now quickly be assessed for newly acquired competences so that we have a quick and reliable overview of who can be deployed where. We also use job profiles linked to competences. And employees now manage their own competences and can simply be assessed and approved by their manager.

This way, everyone always has an up-to-date overview of their skills and competences, including any actions they need to take. For example, recertification for a certificate that has expired.

AG5 also provides automatic email notifications about certifications that are about to expire, so you won’t forget anything. This used to cause a lot of stress.

This new system allows us to save at least 40% of time spent on tasks that used to lie with the administration, such as keeping all competences up to date and checked.