KVP keeps trucks moving

Thomann Nutzfahrzeuge AG promises its customers flexibility and seamless services. "This requires employees who contribute their full potential and form efficient teams," says CEO Luzi Thomann. The company was therefore looking for solutions to professionalise personnel and organisational development and to make it consistent across the three locations Schmerikon, Chur and Frauenfeld.

CIP in expansion situation

A brief look at the company history makes it clear why the evaluation of a CIP software became an issue for Thomann AG. The number of employees alone shows the rapid development. Founded in 1995, the family business grew from 37 employees in 2004 to 90 in 2008; today the company has 140 employees, including 25 apprentices. The personnel growth of around 380 percent in the last nine years is linked to further major projects. A new building in Schmerikon, the establishment of branches in Chur and recently also in Frauenfeld, the development of dual-brand strategies in both the truck and bus sectors are the main keywords here.

"As a quality fanatic, I am extremely proud that we have always been able to maintain top quality in these turbulent times," says a delighted Luzi Thomann. Indeed: the company has achieved a whole series of top rankings in major industry awards, won the St.Gallen Innovation Prize in 2003 and has already been nominated twice for the Swiss Fairness Prize.

It is more than understandable that in this environment personnel qualification and development was handled with simple Excel tools for a long time. "In 2010, we had already decided to make a more professional tool ourselves when we came across Improve," recalls Luzi Thomann.

Qualification talks as a trigger

According to

Originally, Thomann AG was looking for a better solution for the qualification interviews. With regard to employee qualification, the company wanted to "get away from poor snapshots on 28 December" and move towards a "meaningful film covering the whole year", as the 46-year-old entrepreneur puts it. The idea was to take the "qualification interviews" away from being a tiresome compulsory exercise and to create a genuine management tool based on a combined self-assessment and assessment by superiors. Beyond each individual, the solution sought was also to provide a sound basis and optimization possibilities at departmental and team level, and to do so uniformly for all locations.

"Luzi Thomann explains his experience with Improve as follows: "I was looking for better qualification interviews and ended up with structured personnel development. The software is based on a comprehensive approach. The aim is to attract, motivate, retain and develop good specialists. The model of "structured human resources development" captures

• personal development,
• team development
• and organizational development.

Improve's holistic approach begins with employee qualification, which covers five levels (Figure 1). Each of these levels is stored in the software with "Competencies", "Indicators" and "Observation Dimensions" and provided with a simple point evaluation system (Figure 2). The breakdown into competencies, indicators and observation dimensions maps the requirement profiles. The precise development of function and job descriptions is a must for the Improve user and has a basic character; all evaluations can only be as good as the quality of these descriptions.

Four stages of development

Improve is one of the few tools on the quality software market that also covers the developmental stages of employee competency:

• Accompany
• Train
• Develop 
• Delegate

The four stages are based on a model developed by the personnel management company Merido AG (Zurich), Synprovis' defined partner for organizational development. "For the right team design or the right mix of development stages within a team, this model offers valuable management support," underlines Synprovis CEO Hubert Geisseler. New, inexperienced or deeply skilled employees need "guidance " and supervision . "Training" is the name of the game for relatively inexperienced employees, for whom the focus is on predefined tasks. "Develop" is the name of the game for those employees who need little guidance, make routine decisions themselves, but need motivational support. Finally, "delegate" is the motto for independent, competent professionals who require only minimal supervision.

Effects at Thomann AG

"Improve has managed the balancing act between simplicity and the required flexibility for us," Luzi Thomann sums up. He mentions the increased acceptance of employee appraisals, which are now designed as a year-round process and represent a building block of holistic employee development. In addition, the KVP software has triggered the following effects in the company:

• The high degree of systematisation across the Schmerikon, Chur and Frauenfeld sites has brought optimum comparability and consistency. 
• Each individual is clear about the opportunities available to them on the career ladder; the interface with training and development programmes works. 
• Departments and teams have been optimised in terms of their skill mix, and team efficiency and the leadership quality of team leaders have increased.
• The management effort for Improve is surprisingly low because the tool uses an 80/20 model to preset 80 percent of the criteria and wording. 
• Data protection is fully guaranteed.

For the owner of Thomann AG, another strong indicator of success is that the CIP software has not provoked "a single negative feedback from among the employees" in the two years it has been in use.

Improve also for test equipment

Thomann AG uses Improve on a broad front and also covers the topics of error messages, suggestion systems, occupational safety, environmental management and testing and measuring equipment. The latter is of great importance for maintenance, as Thomann AG uses Improve to maintain and calibrate around 70 devices ranging from torque wrenches to oil separators. "We achieve effective investment protection in this way," concludes Luzi Thomann positively.