How Vista stopped wasting thousands of dollars on unnecessary training
Overtraining visible for the first time, skills gaps transparent across every department, and development roadmaps replacing departmental guesswork.
Every department doing it their own way
Vista is a printing and packaging manufacturer with a strongly data-driven culture. Skills and training data existed across the business, but each department maintained its own Excel, in its own format, with no shared view across them.
“We needed greater overall clarity,” said John Kanters, Learning & Development Coordinator at Vista. “Not just for a single department, but an overview of all departments.”
Without that overview, the business couldn’t answer basic workforce planning questions. How many people did each shift need for each production process? Who held which skills? Where were the gaps?
The answers sat in separate files that nobody could see simultaneously.
The cost of not knowing
The most surprising discovery AG5 surfaced was not a gap, but an excess. Kanters found that for a number of production processes, Vista had trained far more people than the process actually required.
“If you only need four people for a given production process but 14 have been trained, then you have spent a lot of money for no good reason,” Kanters said. “Those funds were simply wasted in the past. That money could have been better spent differently.”
Vista tracks this in non-processing hours, or time employees spent in training rather than on the line. At €50 per hour, for example, 200 unnecessary non-processing hours costs €10,000. Multiplied across processes and shifts, the savings from eliminating overtraining are significant.
If you only need four people for a given production process but 14 have been trained, then you have spent a lot of money for no good reason.
John Kanters
Learning & Development Coordinator, Vista
A roadmap from operator A to operator B
AG5 also gave Vista the structure to make development explicit. Rather than leaving progression informal, the team built development roadmaps that link each position to the specific training courses required to reach it.
“If you wish to develop from Operator A to Operator B, then you must follow the specific training courses,” Kanters said. “We now have a clear overview of this for each person. How far is an employee along their development plan?”
Combined with shift-level forecasting, showing exactly how many trained people each production process needs, Vista now plans training based on actual requirements rather than assumption.
We now know who has those skills, and if those skills are missing then we are aware of the skills gap directly. We never had that overview before.
John Kanters
Learning & Development Coordinator, Vista
