Tyson Foods Manages Personnel Training Data with Poka-Workday Integration

Enhancing Operators’ Quality of Life at Tyson Foods

Poka is a core enabler of Tyson's Productivity System (TPS) program for better connecting operators to one another. It allowed them to share best practices more effectively in engaging formats in over 50 languages, enriching their training and personal development initiatives and bringing them information faster, digitally.

Ultimately, Poka provided excitement for operators to own the journey, put the best product on shelves, and drove the culture of Continuous Improvement. "Poka was the perfect solution to further enhance the quality of life for our frontline team members and bring value to them. Poka as a solution, was modeled with a manufacturing environment in mind,” said Julian Gonzales, Senior Applications Analyst at Tyson Foods.

Workday was used at Tyson for team member management - capturing changes in the frontline team structures and personnel information.

Tyson's Workday-Poka integration task force included individuals from the corporate level responsible for bringing the company’s vision to life, stakeholders from the shop floor with their ears on the ground, and members of the Poka team providing guidance and strategic alignment.

Once the two systems were connected, scalable integration was key to a successful outcome. 

Julian adds, "We have found that Poka brilliantly did not build itself to replace other solutions—by design, it interacts effectively with [other systems]. Its open API capabilities provide flexibility in how the data is structured."

The integration resulted in team member records in Workday accurately and comprehensively reflecting their skills assignments, progress and viewing, and endorsements of exam completions captured in Poka. Team information was now available and accessible across systems. In addition, the integration was extended to include Power BI, so real-time reporting and analytics were available on a dashboard that showcased Enterprise Training Data for corporate leadership. This is a considerable advancement, given that teams relied on a daily Excel dump before the integration.

Julian ends by saying, "Realizing the value proposition with Poka, we focused predominantly on integrating with Poka's Skills and Learning feature, but we have been leveraging Poka in many other areas. Equipment knowledge management and master data are updated and synced daily. Poka's robust Forms and Checklists feature aligns with our maintenance data capture needs, allowing us to monitor process controls, track any issues up to their resolution, and aggregate the entire process in comprehensive reports for leadership."