Recording of qualifications for 1,000 craftsmen

THOR^® is a leading company in house, building and supply engineering as a personnel service provider with 1,000 employees from various special trades. THOR^® employees are deployed throughout Germany on various construction projects. Their schedulers are faced with the challenge of always finding the employee whose qualifications and personal skills best match the customer's assignment.

Initial situation

THOR^® employees are qualified in various trades: Heating and plumbing technology, refrigeration technology, air conditioning technology, ventilation technology, piping construction, electrical engineering and elevator technology. Each trade comprises countless individual qualifications and activities, which can be queried in a customer inquiry. Until recently, finding the right fitter from the pool of employees required a considerable amount of effort, as the knowledge about the qualifications was only available in paper form in the personnel file and in the heads of the personal dispatcher. For most inquiries, this was like the famous search for "a needle in a haystack".

Our Task

THOR^® therefore commissioned SITEFORUM to develop a complex but user-friendly qualification query to digitally record and track every single qualification of an employee. In addition, the employee pool was to be easily searchable at any time in the event of a customer inquiry, in order to relieve the scheduling department for day-to-day business. In other words: a matching of employee qualifications and customer requirements.

Example: show all employees with very good skills in WIG welding, ability to work at heights up to 50m, basic knowledge of English and very good team skills.

The complexity of this is very special, as the entire query is made up of over 800 interdependent individual qualifications. In addition, multilingualism had to be implemented due to the different nationalities of the employees. 

Solution

THOR^® was already using our employee portal based on the SITEFORUM digitalization platform. Thus, the implementation could be started directly. With the help of the SITEFORUM Form Builder, the multi-level qualification query was first implemented. The advantage: the module is inherently multilingual and generic, which means that the query can be adapted, extended and translated into new languages by the internal IT department at any time.

The query was then activated in the employee portal, allowing each employee to enter their qualifications in self-service using their company tablet. In less than 30 minutes, a complete qualification profile was created for each fitter.



Finally, SITEFORUM developed a list with numerous filters to search the entire employee pool for qualifications. Search requests can be saved for recurring operations and sorted by hit rate (number of matches).

Results

Every THOR^® employee now has a complete qualification profile that supports the dispatchers in their daily job planning. The query has also been integrated into the recruiting process so that new employees can be searched for from day 1. This has improved the dispatchers' day-to-day operations and made them more efficient.  Even the in-house THOR^® Academy now uses the tool to plan training and further education measures.

In the next stage of expansion, it is now planned to develop and integrate order planning in order to do away with the previous Excel spreadsheets and, in addition to qualifications, to map availability and travel times to the site.