L'Oréal Gains a 9% Higher OEE With New Hires Trained Using Poka
Since implementing Poka in early 2019, L'Oréal has empowered frontline workers to become more autonomous with their training and has gained more visibility into skills data that guides their L&D strategy. With Poka, they increased the number of skills they were managing and tracking by 547%, covering multiple areas such as security, safety, quality, operations, and more.
About L’Oréal Canada
The L'Oréal site in Montreal produces many of the most popular hair and skin care products we love to use every day. The site has over 350 employees, and 50 production lines and skids. Despite the scale of the production environment, the plant demonstrated great agility and operational excellence during the pandemic when it shifted to producing hand sanitizing gels for hospitals.
L’Oréal Skills and Training KPIs
OEE, while onboarding 26 new staff
Training completion rate
New skills managed in Poka
Of skills and training now tracked
Before implementing Poka, training content and records were decentralized - fragmented across a mishmash of systems and paper forms. HR alone was responsible for maintaining records. The process was manual, inefficient, and time-consuming. As a result, training records were often out of date, and the team lacked the visibility needed to identify training gaps properly.
According to Sarina Doyon-Leroux, Advisor for Human Resources at L’Oréal, "It was hard to gain visibility and track the progress new hires made after completing a mandated three-week period where they shadow an experienced worker on the floor."
This view shows the challenges faced before and after Poka
L'Oréal has scaled to 259 skills from just 40 by leveraging Poka's Work Instructions and Skills Management features. Despite this increase, the management and tracking of skills are much easier since it is now digital and centralized. Workers and managers have the visibility and autonomy to keep skills and training records up to date through Poka. As a result, L'Oréal improved their training completion from 70% to 80%. Although a 10% increase seems modest, it's important to keep in mind that this was accomplished while their number of skills grew significantly.
An even more compelling benefit they shared was that the quality of training they’ve built and delivered through Poka enabled them to onboard 26 new employees in 2020, while seeing a 5% month-over-month improvement in OEE. Historically, any onboarding event would be associated with a drop in productivity. Such was the case in a similar pre-Poka situation in 2018 when they saw a decline of 6% in OEE.
“With Poka, we are able to track KPIs by category and by department, and with this information, we can adapt the Learning Strategy for the program moving forward. ”
Having centralized, real-time data on training KPIs is a massive advantage for L'Oréal. The dashboards they've created help them identify gaps by department, workstation, and skill. They pull daily numbers, review the data to evaluate the success of integrating newcomers into the plant, and plan next month's training priorities. In Marc-André Lavoie's words, Project Manager for Continuous Improvements at L’Oréal, "With Poka, we are able to track KPIs by category and by department, and with this information, we can adapt the Learning Strategy for the program moving forward."