Digitising training ecosystem to enable productivity and scalability
Background
GIANTECH Engineering is a well respected one‐stop service station for many global marine and offshore equipment makers, assisting shipowners and fleet managers with their tanker needs.
Founded in 2001, this Singapore based enterprise is now helmed by the second generation leader. The current CEO has doubled the revenue of the company since he took over in 2011 and he has an aspiration to grow and expand the business regionally.
The Problem
In the marine equipment servicing industry, training is typically unstructured, on-the-job and discipleship-based. On an average, it takes 8-12 months for a Giantech engineer to be fully proficient in a new system before he could be sent to work onboard a vessel independently.
In order to grow and expand its footprint, Giantech is on a quest to represent more brands and systems. However, the long training time required for its engineers to pick up a new system greatly limits Giantech's ability to scale up its business. To overcome this challenge, it needs to accelerate its employee-to-market.
The Solution
Between April 2016 to January 2018, IOResources was engaged as the consultant to help Giantech to accelerate the learning process from 12 months to 6 months. Partnering Gnowbe, a Silicon Valley and Singapore based mobile learning app, we were on a mission to digitise Giantech's institutional knowledge and learning experience of Giantech engineers.
We designed and develop a micro learning program to put the engineers on a structured learning journey. The content is bite-sized and delivered in different formats - video, images, words, diagrams, etc. The app would automate the learning process, ushering the engineers to different learning sources and requiring them to interact with the app by reading, watching, Q&As, uploading of images, etc.
The app-based program also serves as an interactive platform for the Giantech engineers, its OEMs and clients to record, share and discuss new cases; a mobile job aide to bring along when the engineers go on duty; and a content management platform to update and pushes out new and old digitised knowledge base - all at the same time.
How We Do It
As part of the process, we performed task analysis, curate methodologies, approaches and cases and established the baseline knowledge to reconstruct the learning process.
We conducted task analysis workshops and facilitated the standardisation of terminologies and consensus to the approaches. Our findings were organised in forms of diagrams, video clips and concise descriptions, almost simultaneously if not soon after the facilitation sessions, uploaded to Gnowbe.
Eventually, a digital operational blueprint and manual emerges. It is essentially the institutional knowledge and intellectual property Giantech has accumulated over the years.
Next, applying adult learning psychology and models, we designed, developed bite-sized, micro learning programs with the information, delivering and measuring the effectiveness of knowledge transfer all within the Gnowbe app.
To make sure the program works, we even invited non engineers to try out the program. The result was a success - they were able to accurately perform the tasks after going through the learning. Based on the results, we are confident that a qualified engineer could achieve proficiency in 6 months or less.
The Outcome
Giantech's aim was achieved based on the system selected and started extending the methodology to other systems it is servicing.
During the project, it launches its first overseas office in India and started planning for its technical training academy business. The ability to digitise its institutional knowledge and transform its organisational learning approach has opened up a whole new space and new possibilities for Giantech.
Giantech was featured in the special report of a main Singapore Chinese newspapers, Lianhe Zaobao. Special thanks to Mr. Soo Heong Goh and Mr. Dilong Goh, the father and son team who founded and transformed of Giantech Engineering to mention and acknowledge IOResources in the interview.
