Virgile Pfennig, an engineering manager at Daher, USA shares with us his experience with Alex.
Can you introduce yourself?
“Virgile Pfennig, Engineering Manager for Daher in North America. Daher is a family business for just over 150 years, and is on 3 main lines of business : the service part in which I am located, the aircraft part and the industry part. I am in charge of engineering in the NA region, so the methods, process and project part but also the innovation topics like we saw for Alex, all the new tools integrated into our activities.“
Why Alex?
“Why Alex in our activities? In fact, we carry out logistics service activities and therefore that involves different skills. Starting from a control of parts to a basic control, Kitting, storage and sometimes a little more advanced skills on the shipment of dangerous materials, on quality control, which requires skill management with expiration dates and above all, regulations that comply with the requirements, which can be AS9100 for example or simply the requirements of EASA and other certifying bodies.
So in this context, skills management is extremely important and it is regularly audited.“
And before Alex?
“We managed skills in an old way, quite traditional with Excel matrices, with paper files, with proofs of training, certification documents, and therefore a fairly manual management in the form of an Excel matrix with expiry dates. A very classic matrix management!“
The implementation of Alex
“With Alex that we launched in 2020/2021 on the US mobile site in Alabama as a pilot site for the region with then an objective to develop in the rest of the region Canada and Mexico also on our logistics activities.
So we implemented the structure in Alex. The structure of competences, the structure of activities. And then we had a phase of migration to Alex, all this with the ultimate objective of facilitating the management of skills on a daily basis, to facilitate the work of the training manager.
But also to have more robustness in the management of our skills, the management of skills expiry and a much more intuitive use for versatility reasons and simply for skills development reasons, and then also to give some progress plans to our employees who, as a result, have a vision of their skills.“
What has changed with Alex ?
“What Alex brought us and what Alex continues to bring us today is not only a much more robust management of worker’s skills, but also an extremely simple, extremely intuitive yet very functional interface with a very clear vision per employee, per skill, in the form of a matrix of the skill levels of each person and especially alerts on the functional and daily part, on the training management and skills management, who is trained in which position and the information is always up to date.
And thus the management of alerts on the expiry of certifications to anticipate training and maintain these skill levels. Also what we were able to have as a very positive effect, is what I mentioned earlier: the audits. We have been audited as is done regularly by the EASA through our customers. So it was really easy in the end to prove the skills levels and to take out the proof which is often requested to justify the traceability of skills, then finally find the history even of people who left the company by keeping their traceability. And so we could very easily in 2, 3 clicks find the proof of training that allowed us to justify and answer the questions of the auditors.“
What is the best benefit?
“ALEX for us is the ease of skill management and the development of versatility by a tool that is very intuitive and yet very robust.“
The final word
“We have this need, and I think we have this need everywhere to improve skills management with intuitive digital tools. Even with only the app on the phone you are able to check the skill in the field in real time without having to be at your desk in front of your PC, and for the operator as well as the team leader and the training manager to have access to the information in real time in their pocket.
It’s a real comfort and a real ease in daily operations !”
We would like to thank Virgile Pfennig, as well as the whole team at Daher, USA !
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