🎙️ What’s in this Episode?
In this 15-minute podcast, our CEO & Co-Founder, Baptiste Gendron, joins Caroline Mondon to discuss the challenges of skill flow in companies and how to overcome them effectively.
📌 Main Topics Covered:
- The impact of skill flow disruptions on operational efficiency.
- How to tackle outdated skills matrices and unexpected departures.
- Best practices for onboarding new employees faster.
- How #Alex ensures a perfect match between workforce skills and production tools at every level.
🎧 Listen to the Full Episode
Click below to hear the translated version of the podcast:
Prefer to listen in French? 👉 Click here for the original version
💬 We’d love to hear your thoughts! What challenges do you face with skill management in your company?
Abstract
Definition of Skill Flow
Flow refers to a continuous movement or transfer. Within a company, there are four essential flows that ensure smooth operations:
- Information Flow – Includes forecasts, customer orders, production instructions, and alerts for quality issues.
- Financial Flow – Covers cash flow, treasury, and the well-known Working Capital Requirement (WCR), which, when excessive, is the leading cause of SME failures in France.
- Physical Flow – Involves raw materials, subassemblies, finished products, and associated services.
- Skill Flow – Addresses who has the skills, how they are transferred, to whom, and when.
The business leader acts as the conductor of these flows, ensuring their seamless coordination to prevent disruptions that could impact customers while maintaining the profitability of the processes supporting these flows.
When flows are well-coordinated, the company’s supply chain generates value, making it a dynamic lever for implementing the leader’s strategic vision.
Who is Baptiste Gendron?
What Does Yelhow Do?
Yelhow’s mission is to help companies become more efficient and resilient. By processing real-time data from the field, Yelhow ensures an optimal match between production needs and available skills.
Yelhow operates in two key areas:
1️⃣ Industrial Software Development
As a software developer and designer, Yelhow provides visual, simple, and mobile digital tools to support frontline workers in their daily tasks.
This led to the creation of:
- Alex – A solution for skills management, versatility tracking, and training.
- Tim – An operational scheduling tool.
2️⃣ Supporting Industrial Companies Through Change Management
Yelhow helps industries implement strategies for workforce development, skill management, and knowledge transfer, ensuring sustainable operational growth.
What Inspired Baptiste to Create Yelhow?
The idea for Yelhow was sparked by a key partnership with Daher, an industrial group that gave Baptiste access to over a hundred factories worldwide.
This experience served as a real-world laboratory, allowing him to closely observe the state of industrial operations. What stood out was a clear imbalance: companies heavily invest in machines, but not in people, even though employees are the key players in ensuring the smooth flow of operations.
This realization drove Baptiste to create Yelhow, with the mission of empowering people in industrial environments by providing them with the right tools to manage skills, knowledge transfer, and workforce efficiency.
What Did Baptiste Observe as a Result of This Finding?
Across industries and company sizes, the same recurring issues kept appearing, all leading to inefficiencies and operational risks.
Outdated skills matrices create gaps between documentation and reality. During certification audits, discrepancies between official skills records and actual field expertise were systematic. The root cause? Data overload. In a 100-person team, tracking 100 different skills, certifications, and competencies results in 10,000 data points to monitor daily. With teams constantly changing and processes evolving, Excel spreadsheets are never up to date.
High turnover and mass retirements lead to critical skill loss. Employees stay with companies for shorter periods, temporary workers are used more frequently, and experienced employees retire without passing on their knowledge. This breaks the skill flow, making it difficult to maintain expertise in key operational roles. In some cases, it can take up to two years to relearn how to operate a workstation or fine-tune a machine.
Inefficient onboarding slows down operations and affects performance. New hires who are not properly trained struggle to reach full productivity, which impacts quality, efficiency, and overall workflow. Poor training leads to errors, delays, and increased waste, all of which put financial strain on the business.
These recurring problems make it clear that without a structured, real-time approach to skill management, companies face constant disruptions that hurt efficiency, quality, and long-term resilience.
How Do These Issues Impact Operational Flows?
These challenges disrupt key business flows, leading to inefficiencies, compliance risks, and operational slowdowns.
Outdated skills matrices break the information flow. Since these matrices guide operational decisions, any mismatch between documented skills and actual expertise can result in compliance failures during certification audits. Worse, assigning unqualified employees to critical tasks increases safety risks.
High turnover and retirements interrupt the skill flow. When experienced employees leave without transferring their expertise, companies face long-term knowledge gaps. It can take up to two years to fully regain lost know-how in machine operation, process adjustments, or troubleshooting.
Poor onboarding and training affect quality and productivity. New employees who are not properly trained contribute to lower product quality, reduced efficiency on the production floor, and unnecessary stock buildup, which ties up financial resources.
Beyond these internal disruptions, external factors further complicate operations. Supply chains are increasingly complex, and talent shortages and supply disruptions add even more pressure. To stay competitive, businesses must gain better control over these flows, ensuring agility and long-term resilience.
Baptiste’s Solution to Increasing Complexity
The key to addressing these growing challenges? Introducing agility to stabilize fluctuations in business flows.
At Yelhow, the focus is on developing team agility to enhance both performance and resilience across the company.
🔑 The Core Solution: Versatility & Collective Intelligence
- Versatility enables employees to work across multiple roles, strengthening their understanding of business flows.
- When employees grasp where processes start and end, they can better protect and optimize workflows.
- Collective intelligence thrives in agile teams, leading to faster problem-solving and continuous improvement.
By embedding agility and versatility into operations, companies can anticipate disruptions, maintain efficiency, and ensure long-term success in an unpredictable industrial landscape. 🚀
How Does Baptiste Propose to Solve These Universal Problems?
To navigate today’s industrial challenges, companies must ensure a seamless flow of information, skills, and resources.
By integrating real-time field data into skills management, training, and workforce planning, Yelhow provides a structured, data-driven approach to workforce agility. This helps companies:
- Anticipate disruptions and maintain efficiency.
- Ensure knowledge transfer and prevent skill loss.
- Align training plans with production needs for better workforce planning.
Through simplicity, transparency, and structure, Yelhow transforms complexity into agility, helping businesses stay competitive and resilient.
The Big Picture
By integrating real-time field data into skills management, training, and workforce planning, Yelhow enables companies to transform complexity into agility—ensuring efficiency, resilience, and long-term success. 🚀
Every Leader and HR Executive Has Dreamed of Real-Time Access to Field Data—What’s the Secret Sauce?
The “secret sauce” to making this work lies in internal trainers—recognized and valued at the same level as managers by leadership.
🔑 Why Are Internal Trainers the Key?
- When trainers teach and share knowledge, they become the driving force behind continuous improvement.
- They introduce innovations, ensuring that new best practices are adopted across the company.
- By working closely with managers, they help maintain the flow of skills and knowledge, ensuring real-time, up-to-date data circulation.
🚀 Outcome: A virtuous cycle where knowledge transfer fuels innovation, operational efficiency, and long-term business agility.
Does Baptiste Use Artificial Intelligence, and If So, How?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning have been around for forty years, but today, with access to vast amounts of data and powerful machines, we can extract much more valuable insights.
Here are some ways AI is utilized at Yelhow:
🔍 AI in Action:
- Training Suggestions: AI can recommend specific training programs based on real-time productivity levels or the number of quality defects, comparing them to historical data (e.g., Gaussian distributions).
- Versatility Goals: It suggests team-specific versatility objectives, considering past and future workload forecasts, along with employee absences (vacations, sick days).
- Intelligent Scheduling: AI helps design an optimal training schedule to ensure regular skill maintenance within the team.
AI proves particularly valuable because it analyzes past data to propose future actions, making operations more proactive and efficient.
Final Recommendations:
In today’s complex supply chains and uncertain world, combined with the rising employee turnover, internal trainers are at the heart of creating value for the company. They ensure continuous improvement and the introduction of innovations.
To Leaders and HR Executives:
- Track in real-time and anticipate employee versatility.
- Mobile digital tools powered by AI make this possible.
- Recognizing and encouraging employee versatility will become a driver of performance, agility, and resilience for the business.
Use a visual tool for tracking training and versatility, accessible to everyone, acting as a clear reflection of the company’s collective intelligence.
This is the key to Yelhow’s success: Through simplicity, transparency, and structure, this innovation enables skill flow to lay the foundation for company sustainability.