When you work for a company with more than 6,000 employees scattered across 32 globally dispersed locations, consistency and visibility remain crucial to your success. Knowing this, the Kautex HR team sought a way to unify and streamline a series of inefficient HR training request processes.

On the front end, each training request went through a series of manual handoffs and approvals. The resulting roulette between the requesting trainee, approving manager and global HR team left HR trying to solve a paper-trail puzzle made of thousands of moving pieces. The issue was further magnified by the lack of a universal process across Kautex’s many locations.

However, the initial approval process was only the beginning. On the back end of each training session, a member of the HR team was responsible for verifying training attendance, logging attendance in the corporate database and collecting training evaluations via survey from both the attendee and approving manager.

With all of these items dependent on manual implementation, it was no surprise a training request could have a life cycle of nearly one year. With an estimated 1,000 training requests processed at Kautex headquarters alone (headquarters accounts for 20 percent of the “connected” Kautex global workforce), this meant serious backlog on processing these requests.
In search of a simpler, more efficient means of organizing and processing all requests and follow up, the HR team sought out Kautex’s Jon Jenkins, manager of IT business process automation, for help.

Jenkins’ team (Madhura Jayasundar, Nirutha Karanth and Patrick Falvey) had earned a reputation for solving a variety of unique business problems both expediently and efficiently. The team’s secret sauce? PMG’s Digital Business Platform. PMG offers low-code configuration to put control in the hands of citizen developers, a feature Jenkins’ team thrived on as they worked with a variety of Kautex departments.

Specifically, the HR team hoped Jenkins could help streamline all training requests while implementing a universal process for greater consistency across Kautex’s globally dispersed offices. After analyzing the workflow in play for each HR training request, Jenkins quickly realized PMG’s platform would nicely serve the team in this instance, as well.

“In situations like this, it’s great to have PMG in our arsenal,” said Jenkins. “The system is robust enough to address complex issues yet nimble enough to allow us to be independent. I’ve yet to find anything that people have requested that we haven’t been able to do.”

After identifying chokepoints in the training request processes, Jenkins’ team leveraged PMG’s low-code workflow designer to develop an alternative, automated workflow for implementation across all Kautex locations. Now, the HR team can rely on time- and activity-triggered notifications to ensure training requests keep progressing toward completion.

Jenkins’ team also saw an opportunity to drive operational visibility. Using PMG’s reporting functionality to build in-depth performance reports, Jenkins’ team enabled HR to more easily monitor, track and analyze annual training requests at a higher level.

With several successes banked in other Kautex departments, PMG delivered a series of eye-opening results for Kautex’s HR team. With PMG’s reports, the team soon learned it wasn’t processing the estimated 1,000 training requests each year. It was in fact processing 150 percent more than forecast—a total of 2,500 requests. And that was just at Kautex HQ. Fortunately, PMG helped the team dramatically expedite the request process for a number of additional Kautex sites, which have recently begun using this application, as well.

However, Kautex didn’t view the results merely as a cost-saving benefit. The team also prized the simplicity offered by the automated request process. And combining these streamlined processes with access to real data showed the value the HR team was providing.

Perhaps most importantly, PMG’s drag-and-drop workflow designer allows Kautex to easily tweak their processes at will. Now when the team identifies inefficiencies in the system, Jenkins’ team can easily implement those changes.

With another successful project in the books, Jenkins related this instance back to similar initiatives he’s helped simplify throughout his career.

“What we find is people often have processes that grow up over time and become their own series of little monsters. Sometimes what they need is to take it back under control so there’s less effort, less wasted time and more awareness. PMG helps us provide that visibility and get those processes back under control.”

With PMG’s Digital Business Platform, Jenkins and his team of citizen developers look as though they have a firm grip on Kautex’s “series of little monsters.” Each project ultimately leads to greater organizational efficiency and visibility across Kautex’s 32 locations.