BAE Systems Submarine Solutions rationalizes its approach to people management

Citation

(2007), "BAE Systems Submarine Solutions rationalizes its approach to people management", Industrial and Commercial Training, Vol. 39 No. 7. https://doi.org/10.1108/ict.2007.03739gab.010

BAE Systems Submarine Solutions rationalizes its approach to people management

BAE Systems Submarine Solutions has chosen capability-management expert InfoBasis to help it to rationalize and extend its existing people-management systems. Some 3,500 staff, across multiple sites in the UK, will be affected by the implementation of the InfoBasis enterprise-skills manager (ESM).

“This is part of an initiative to consolidate individual HR processes and benefit from having them work together,” said Phil Walker, head of operational HR. The move includes plans for extended job-role profiling, meeting compliance standards and reducing administrative overheads.

In the past, BAE Systems Submarines Solutions kept up to 1,500 role profiles in individual Microsoft Word documents, but the increased complexity of the descriptions meant maintaining these documents had become time-consuming. “Changing a line in the job description of a draughtsman, for instance, required changing the profiles of all draughtsmen,” explained Phil Walker.

“We considered building a solution for this in-house, but it was soon clear that an external provider could help us not only with role profiling, but also with many other areas of business functionality,” he continued.

The system incorporates several competency frameworks for skill assessment, including BAE Systems’ own project-management matrix. “This enables personal-development planning for both professional and production employees, while also allowing us to manage employee skills in line with corporate requirements,” Phil Walker commented.

The deployment has also enabled systems consolidation. Whereas previously all competencies required for work in the nuclear industry were stored in the company’s stand-alone competency-management system, that information is now included in the ESM, enabling centralized reporting and requiring less maintenance. This single skill platform makes it faster for BAE Systems Submarine Solutions to satisfy the customer and the regulatory groups it works with. These include the Lloyds Quality Register of Assurance, which requires reports on each member’s skills-base data.

“Building and maintaining submarines requires an increasingly skilled workforce,” commented the InfoBasis chief executive, Ashley Wheaton. “With the InfoBasis ESM, BAE Systems Submarine Solutions will be able to ensure that its people are deployed and developed as effectively as possible.”