As Australia’s largest rail freight operator with a workforce of over 9000 staff across Queensland, QR National has stringent requirements around staff training and accreditation, and has used SAP Learning Solution (LSO) to manage organizational compliance. Freya Purnell reports.
Background
QR National is both a young company and a very old company – once a single entity under QR Limited with a 145-year history, QR was separated into two companies in July 2010. QR National moves more than $50 billion worth of freight by rail each year, has 756 locomotives and 16,000 wagons, and maintains around 2300 kilometres of network. Presenting at the recent SAP Australian User Group Plenary in Brisbane, Peter Downey, manager LMS support, information services division, application delivery – enterprise for QR National, says, “We work in an industry that carries with it a number of safety obligations, a lot of governance and heavy regulation, so looking for a solution that addressed those requirements was key.”
These safety obligations are being formalised through a national rail safety worker competence framework. Under these requirements, rail transport operators must ensure that each rail safety worker on their operations is deemed competent to carry out their work, as measured against qualifications.
“As we move towards that, we have in our systems been working towards reporting on compliance requirements,” Downey says.
Fortunately, QR National is already a registered training organisation (RTO), offering rail operations and rail infrastructure units and qualifications, as well as first aid and construction qualifications.
With an extensive SAP landscape in place, Downey says QR National was able to integrate the LSO through the Finance and HR/Payroll components.
“We already work under a position-based learning mode. We developed, using BI and BW, compliance reporting and deployed functionality to managers to report on the compliance status of the workforce.
“We also initiated the use of appraisal functionality in SAP, customised some SAP workflow, and utilised course program structures and unique qualification groupings,” Downey says. Some of this functionality is available as standard through the SAP LSO, while other components have been custom developed.
Ensuring staff carry required qualifications and accreditations
Using a position-based learning model, QR National was able to assign qualifications to each type of position, with reports showing management which staff members are compliant against a qualification required for the position. By accessing the LMS portal, workers are able to see whether they are compliant or non-compliant and the proficiency levels they need to obtain. It also shows a timeframe for when they need to be compliant, or when an existing qualification is due to expire.
This is maintained through Position Management, with tight control of the master data.
Using an SAP Business Warehouse (BW) custom compliance report, over 220 administrators within the business –those responsible for booking training – are able to see the qualification status of particular people, who needs to obtain a qualification, when qualifications expire and so on. “It provides administrators of the business with an immediate way of accessing those qualifications that need to be monitored and addressed,” Downey says. Managers needed similar information, but at a snapshot level instead, so a dashboard was developed in BW, which shows compliance by qualification groups, and forecasts when qualifications will expire. Within the dashboard, managers are also alerted if someone is booked for training, in order to help with workload planning.
“Managers can run a report in the dashboard about the compliance of every person in that organisational layer,” Downey says.
Using the HR system, this graphical report is delivered to managers that have direct reports. While the security is currently managed manually for these reports, Downey says they are looking at implementing role-based security in the future.
With a large number of contractors working on the QR National network, the company was also able to run safety sessions for around 1500 contractors and track these and the resulting qualifications in the LSO.
Appraisals on the go
Because the QR National workforce is very diverse and works across some quite remote areas, reaccreditation of workers can be a challenge.
“For example, the best way to assess a train driver is for the assessor to get on the train,” Downey says. “We wanted to empower our assessors to conduct that role without any hindrances, without having to bring them into the classroom.” To streamline this process, QR National established a number of appraisal templates within SAP, accessible through a portal. These templates pull through the qualification requirements for certain positions, and the assessor can use the portal to store all assessment material, including assessment documents. By allowing the assessor to complete the process of determining the assessment outcome and impart the qualification if someone is competent, an additional administrative function is eliminated.
This process ensures that assessors are always using the most up-to-date appraisal document with the appropriate version control. As a dynamic document, the assessor is able to check if the worker has a current qualification or if it has expired. “We have about 150 appraisal documents in SAP for assessors and instructors to access for various functions, including classroom delivery,” Downey says. “It eliminates the risk that people will be accredited using outdated criteria.” Through the implementation of the Knowledge Management module, QR National was also able to retire half a dozen legacy document management systems across the organisation.
Workflow
QR National implemented a number of workflow items relating to qualifications. Managers and individuals are reminded 90, 60 and 30 days out from qualification expiry, and were given access to the learning portal and information on how to renew qualifications.
This system provides a self-enrolment functionality for workers, as well as a capability for a manager to enrol an individual if they haven’t taken action to address a qualification requirement.
“Anything that is a mandatory requirement bypasses an approval process from the manager,” Downey says. “If someone has been told they have to do something, we’re not going to put a barrier up.”
Course programs and unique qualification groups
For the RTO component, course programs work the same way that they do in tertiary institutions. Courses are grouped into different stages and learners can find out how the course is structured, what units of competency it aligns with, and dates when a course is offered.
“From the back end, we can track who is where in the program structure, and follow up with them,” Downey says. One challenge, when using the LSO, was how QR National’s RTO could report on national units of competency through SAP, which doesn’t have this functionality natively. The company overcame this by creating a national unit of competency group separation, which makes it easier to report for compliance purposes.
“You need to think ahead and do your planning to work out how you want to report on it, and what you want to report on,” Downey says.
Key learnings
Downey says some of the key considerations for those seeking to implement a similar solution are to ensure position profiles are clean and well-maintained, if using position-based learning; focus on communication across the organisation about functionality such as dashboards to ensure maximum take-up; and monitor the system to understand how staff are using the tools and resources and identify opportunities for continuous improvement.
“Now that we are moving torwards the rail safety requirements, we need to look at what we could be doing better, but considering now we have a lot of this infrastructure in place, the move towards that is not such a great leap.
