Chief Learning Officer - October 2007 - (Page 64)

productivity in practice: Chrysler LLC: Metrics, Score Cards and Automobiles It can be a challenge for any company to maintain consistency, and not just for goods and services — the people who deliver or provide them should be held to the same high standards to guarantee business success. When you’re a multinational organization that produces four brands of vehicles, it can be downright tricky. Chrysler LLC (formerly DaimlerChrysler) tackled this issue and leveraged the resulting data to promote strategic education efforts that have led or are leading to additional success. Specifically, the company sought to track, manage and positively affect its Chrysler, Jeep and Dodge dealerships in the United States, Canada and Mexico. In the summer of 2004, Mark Place, senior consultant at Latitude Consulting Group, started to do his initial analysis for Chrysler. “What Chrysler needed was a way to evaluate dealers in a sort of easily digestible way, both for the dealership owners and managers, as well as for the corporate and field personnel who might be interacting with the dealership,” Place said. Patrick Kittle, director of Chrysler’s Five Star program, which seeks to highlight highperforming dealerships, said the company worked closely with Latitude Consulting to develop a dealer score card. The score card helps Chrysler assess its dealers’ performance against a set of key performance indicators such as net profits, minimum sales responsibility and customer satisfaction scores. Combined with Latitude’s learning management system, the dealer score card has provided a great deal of business data that Chrysler has used to better develop learning and development opportunities for its associates. “Chrysler is interested in improving all its dealers,” Place said. “The score card is one tool to help optimize the entire dealer network.” This is in no small part due to the depth and breadth of what the score card measures, Kittle said. “It provides corporate office, field personnel and our dealer body with performance measurements along 37 different metrics, based on a 1,000-point system, spanning business activity from sales and marketing to customer service, vehicle finance and repair,” he said. Further, the dealer score card has helped Chrysler hone in on areas of need among its dealership personnel members. “The combination of knowledge-transfer and performance-tracking solutions allows Chrysler to assess dealer progress toward key performance metrics and targets specific development opportunities,” Kittle said. Accordingly, Chrysler has taken the real-world findings from the score card to create programs at the Chrysler Academy (formerly the DaimlerChrysler Academy). “In dealer development or training, the old adage applies: ‘If you can’t measure it, you cannot manage it’ — information is vital to making business decisions in today’s marketplace,” Kittle said. “For the Chrysler Academy, which is responsible for all dealer training, using financial and sales performance is a way of life. “Training no longer simply tallies how many people attended a class or what score they received on a final exam. Rather, training has evolved — now, the most important metric is, ‘What change occurred in the business process back in the store as a result of training, and how has that change affected the bottom-line performance of the dealership?’” Kittle said Chrysler might consider implementing a similar sort of dealer score card for its international markets, and if it chooses to do so, it would have the option of extending learning and certification courses to dealers, as well as gauge dealer performance and identify critical factors that affect overall dealership performance. — Lisa Rummler, lrummler@clomedia.com operational data as it relates to the organization’s daily activities, the more effective employees become. For example, introducing customer relationship management software would facilitate how a customer service representative (CSR) responds to and addresses the needs of a customer in an effort to create a more intimate experience. But if the CSR does not leverage the new system’s capabilities, problems begin — the learning solution did not address the need adequately. Learning should work in close partnership with other business units to learn what specific operational issues are affected and how to deliver effective learning solutions. At this level, each learning strategy should be tailored to the needs of the business units and their specific operational requirements that cascade up to and align with the organization’s tactical and strategic concerns. Gaining an advantage in increasingly competitive environments is essential for organizations to simply survive, let alone thrive. Whether a company has access to relevant business data can mean the difference between real success and mediocre performance. Every piece of business data available provides companies with evidence and an early indication of how well the organization is meeting its business and strategic objectives. Companies that can exploit their own data and information to gain insight and make smarter decisions will have a clear competitive advantage over their competitors. This is where the role of learning gains prominence in how it translates the data into useable knowledge. As business data plays a greater role and becomes a priority for senior management, companies will need flexible learning solutions that will address and help them act on the business data at hand, and not only in the short term — as a company grows, the acquisition of more complex business data increases, and learning and performance will no longer be relegated to the “back seat.” Rather, like oil in an engine, learning and performance will be viewed as an enabling force that allows companies to leverage the strategic usefulness of their business data. Ajay Pangarkar, CTDP, and Teresa Kirkwood, CTDP, are partners at CentralKnowledge.com and Learningsourceonline.com. They can be reached at editor@clomedia.com. October 2007 I www.clomedia.com I Chief Learning Officer 64 http://www.clomedia.com http://CentralKnowledge.com http://Learningsourceonline.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Chief Learning Officer - October 2007

Editor's Letter Table of Contents Letters to the Editor Taking the Lead Trends Best Practices Effectiveness Guest Editorial Elements of Social Media Arrive on the Learning Scene Trend Micro: Making Learning More Modular CLO Profile Learning’s Role in Talent Management INTTRA: Using Global Learning to Better Enable Talent Management Operationalizing Communities of Practice U.S. Army: Sharing Lessons from the Field Looking Back, Moving Forward Leveraging Business Data to Develop Strategic Learning Solutions Chrysler LLC: Metrics, Score Cards and Automobiles Advertisers' Index Editorial Resources Connecting the Dots: Recognizing Talent Development Differences at Nonprofits Nonprofits in Health Care: Learning at ENH Case Study Business Intelligence Case Study In Conclusion

Chief Learning Officer - October 2007

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