KLM Cargo

This means 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 work.

What’s most important to you in your role? And which problems were you looking to solve?

What’s important to me is having a clear picture about everyone who comes to work at KLM. Who is this person? Where in the world are they working? And do they satisfy profile requirements? Take, for example, the situation when we’re hiring new staff. It used to be really difficult for me to determine who this new employee was, where they were working, and what profile they needed.

Our old system simply received a personnel number from SAP and that was it. 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? I was convinced it was possible to automate this easily enough if only we had the right data. It was affecting new staff’s training.

What were you looking for in a new system?

I wanted a unified system with a dashboard that combined compliance and learning, and that could be integrated with SAP, Moodle, and Cornerstone. What’s more, I needed the dashboard to alert me about imminent compliance expiry and other reminders. Naturally, the system had to have powerful search functionality, so I’d be able to find information about all our staff worldwide – employees and contractors alike.

We used to use Excel spreadsheets that we were continually correcting because they were full of errors. Our corporate learning system didn’t record all the information we needed to be able to retrieve either. What’s more, staff take courses outside of the company and on the job.

This is why we started using AG5 so that we could get a full picture of all our staff’s qualifications and certification and meet our compliance obligations. When we were using spreadsheets, we were continually entering data, making comparisons, and generating reports, no to forget correcting all the errors.

Thankfully, with AG5, we’ve eliminated all the manual data entry, which saves me at least six workdays a month and means I no longer stress about pending audits.

So you were looking to get a better grip on staff planning and training needs?

Yes. Suppose I have to organize a training program for our commercial staff in Asia. I don’t have to consult with our Asia managers to find out which of their staff need training. I can just look in our AG5 system. What’s more, one organization or another comes to audit us almost every month.

And who comes to audit you?

Every month, one organization or another comes to audit us – whether it’s the Dutch Human Environment & Transport Inspectorate, the General Intelligence & Security Service of the Netherlands, Delta Air Lines, or IATA. What they all have in common is that they each want to see our training records.

This means 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.

And have things gotten better since you started using AG5?

We used to use Excel spreadsheets exported from our SAP system. Often, these contained errors because staff had to update the sheets and enter data by hand. And manual updates were simply proving too prone to error. So, we eliminated all manual data entry. Now 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.

My staff also got to grips with the software really quickly because it’s highly intuitive. Simply click and drag! It saves us so much time.