At its heart, the training industry is about partnership and collaboration – connecting with learners, connecting with experts, connecting, of course, with the business. So the real question isn’t whether your learning organization works and plays well with others, but how effectively and efficiently those partnerships operate. One major international firm is about to take outsourcing to the next level and its high hopes for success includes a 50 percent reduction in time to competency.
Maersk Line, the world’s largest container shipping company, certainly knows about connecting with others – moving goods from one place to another is what they do. In fact, at any given time, Maersk Line is transporting cargo worth approximately 3 percent of the world’s Gross National Product. That massive mission is accomplished with about 18,000 employees working in 325 offices located in 125 countries.
With so much at stake, operational efficiency is clearly a necessity. Learning is playing a major role in ensuring that goal is met, and it’s about to take its involvement to a whole new level by changing its formula for working with outsourced suppliers and partners. At the end of this particular line will be a tighter ring of suppliers who work more closely and more deeply with Maersk Line.
Let’s meet now Chris Jephson, a British native working in Maersk Line’s Copenhagen headquarters as director of learning for the organization. Jephson is leading the team initiative to revamp the supplier model, officially kicking the project off in January 2011, with a fairly short timeline to success.
Currently, he says, Maersk Line has worked with its cadre of suppliers in a tactical, operational way. When a learning need arises, they determine their needs and select a supplier best able to deliver for them. Learning-services suppliers don’t get deep into the organization, he said, but instead assist when needs arise.
Over the next six to eight months, all that’s going to change, with the outsourcing relationships going to a deeper, more strategic level. Starting with pilot programs in January, Maersk Line will work with about three to five key suppliers, treating them more as strategic partners and giving them deeper access to the business and information. The learning team will work with them to launch some pilot programs to run through next May.
From that test process, the team hopes to come up with at least two suppliers they’ll work with more closely.
“I’m not sure any one supplier can provide everything we’re looking for so we’ll probably end up with one or two core suppliers and some specialist suppliers who are leading edge in a particular specialized field, for example with Sales or Customer Service,” Jephson said.
The benefits for Maersk Line are obvious: The potential to reduce time to competency for employees and to reduce time to market for products and services.
“The business is obviously interested in reducing time to competence,” Jephson said. “That’s the key thing. The faster we can drive improvement and performance, the faster the business can move on. That’s obviously attractive to business leaders.
“It’s driven by the fact that we can see that we deal with a number of suppliers very tactically, that it takes us too long to get from A to Z and it takes us even longer to actually prepare the organization to receive once we’re ready to implement,” he added. “The best way we can design to resolve all those issues is by being more strategic with a small number of suppliers and focusing more internally on working with the business units to make sure the business units are ready to deliver stuff when we get it to them.”
While the new initiative is just getting underway, it’s been kicking around Maersk Line’s learning team for a couple of months, driven by internal research on how to step up the game.
“Going back to the research we’ve done on our own performance over the last couple of years, we can see we’ve done a good job and we’ve been well-received, but in fact it’s taken quite a long time to produce some of these things,” he said. “We think we can probably reduce the time to competence by about 50 percent relative to where we are right now.”
That’s a notable goal, but the team won’t be working toward that end alone. The suppliers they have spoken with have been very interested in the new strategic-focused initiative.
“The idea is this should be a win internally, but it should also be a win for the supplier, because otherwise they’re not going to be committed to it and that’s really important,” Jephson said. “We’re not rushing it. We want to make sure that we get it right.”
For more information on the role of learning & development at Maersk Line, check out “Learning Transformation: Enabling Business Success,” an on-demand recording of an Oct. 12 Training Industry Webinar presented by Chris Jephson of Maersk Line and Saurabh Mittal of Tata Interactive Systems.
