News story

Ashtead Plant Hire's launch of Traineasy LMS appraisal module a success

Warrington, UKLearning NewsTraineasy

Since 2011, Ashtead Plant Hire Co Ltd (A-Plant) has used Traineasy LMS to provide its employees with access to essential and soft skills training. The imaginatively branded Green Cafe, has now been relaunched with the Traineasy LMS integrated appraisal module.

A-Plant's Green Cafe
A-Plant's Green Cafe 

Ashtead Plant Hire Co Ltd (A-Plant) is one of the UK’s largest plant, tool and equipment hire companies with more than 3,500 employees based accross a number of UK locations. A-Plant forms part of FTSE 100 company Ashtead Group plc, the second largest equipment rental company in the world.

In 2011, A-Plant adopted Traineasy LMS to provide its UK-based employees with access to essential and soft skills training in the form of e-learning. A strategic decision had already been made in 2008 to purchase the authoring tool Lectora, an e-learning template and an onsite workshop from Traineasy in order to develop A-Plant's internal capability in e-learning creation, and now it was felt that Traineasy LMS would offer better value in terms of functionality than the platform that was then in place.

A-Plant's Green Cafe was born and ever since it has provided the business with an easy-to-use LMS for its employees together with a compliance engine permitting flexible rules for obtaining and maintaining training compliance, plus live compliance reporting and a reminder emails system, which gently pushes employees to complete their training and alerts managers when training becomes overdue.

In 2018, a project to relaunch Green Cafe with an integrated appraisal module was announced and since completion in November the same year, employees have been required to fill in their pre-appraisal questionnaires online while line managers use the system to recorded their team's appraisal meetings.

The benefits, in addition to the improved carbon footprint, are in terms of business intelligence; not only can the business now see at a glance how compliant it is with regard to annual appraisals, it can also analyse both employees' answers to pre-appraisal questionnaires and employees' objectives as listed on their personal development plan dashboards.

When asked to comment, Sam Arnold, A-Plant's Talent and Development Manager said, "At last we have a system that ensures not just that appraisals happen when they should but also means managers are conducting them far more consitently in terms of process. We are also using the intelligence available from the Traineasy system to help with succession planning and talent retention."