With a steep decline in the labor force, it’s time to ask the hard questions: Why, in 2021, is there still a line outside my gate? How efficient is our staffing process? Are we wasting the time of the increasingly limited number of professionals we have left? Who is picking up the bill for the people waiting outside the gate? And finally, why do you never see a line outside the biggest industrial park in Norway, Herøya?

Herøya has not always had one of the most streamlined and efficient learning and access systems in Europe. You only need to go back five years to see an access system full of manual steps. In addition, every plant inside the park had its own set of courses and access requirements. Moreover, the parking lot was full of people waiting at every turnaround or even scheduled maintenance on a smaller scale. Something had to be done, and hard questions had to be asked.

In comes Munio. A long-time e-learning partner with more than 15 years of experience working with the process industry. A task force was created, its members including Munio and the major players with locations in Herøya, like Bilfinger, Nippon Gases and Yara. Its task: to analyze the entire operation of getting the right person with the right skills to the right place on time.

What needed to be done was to automate and harmonize the entire process. The task force deconstructed every part of the process and the existing courses. Together, they asked the key question for each part: Do we need this? If yes, why? And how can we make this more efficient? A new set of requirements had to be worked out and a new system had to be built to handle the requirements.

But was it possible to harmonize the e-learning content when the sites and companies were so different? Well, after analyzing all the needs of each different party, it was a pleasant surprise that the majority of all e-learning could be covered in general courses. After all, gravity, ignition temperature and terminal velocity were roughly the same at every site. All this general learning could be covered in individual modules and gathered in a mandatory course package, Munio Access to Industry. In addition, all company-specific e-learning needs would be produced in a smaller “local module” to be added on to the more general part of the course.

To handle the automatization and manage the new e-learning requirements, the system Munio Access was born three years ago. It is a system tailored to digitize and automate all the old processes. A system that allows the industrial park and the factories inside to put specific requirements on different zones based on the dangers and tasks unique to that specific zone. At Herøya, it took the number of manual steps to get one worker into the park from 28 down to just 4.

The system allows a subcontractor to tell it where they want to go, and the system will automatically generate a complete list of requirements to get there, and allows the worker to take most of the needed courses and upload any required certifications well in advance of entering the park.

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