Some may recall Paul McCartney referring to the motor trade in the Beatles’ song “She’s leaving home”. In 1967, when the album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, came out, the British motor industry was enjoying a long period of stability and growth. The young woman McCartney referred to could look forward to a lengthy career in an industry that was largely untouched by foreign competition. This was all to change in a few short years when cheaper and more reliable Japanese cars and motorcycles entered the UK and world market.
It’s happening all over again with Chinese vehicles taking market share from almost all other brands in South Africa. Then there’s the electric vehicle invasion on top of this.
TW is the CFO of a German car dealership. They have a presence in a few cities in South Africa. He tells us that the brand is an aspirational brand in SA and so there is no shortage of people who want to buy one of their vehicles. It’s also very well known for its reliability which is something that they continue to trade on. Despite this, sales volumes are down due to the increased competition. This impacts on this ability to retain staff across the company.
TW notes that even though they are specialist dealership, the company still feels the effects of the technical brain drain. He finds that they lose experienced and trained staff to other dealerships both locally and overseas. And with the Chinese entering the market as aggressively as they are they too are stealing staff.
With this reality at the top of his mind TW has started putting together a training regime that at the very least spreads the internal knowledge throughout the company. There’s no shortage of training; the German brand has a library of content that they push down to the dealership. But it’s always online and there’s no guarantee that anything is taken in. For TW the retention of knowledge in the company fulfilled two critical purposes in the company.
- It ensured that when people left that there were other people who could pick up the slack while a new person was appointed. The knowledge was not completely lost
- It created a culture of knowledge transfer that would help new hires become productive employees in the shortest possible time.
TW took the INTRATERSNHIP concept and re-worked it to be implemented across the company. He started first with peers in a department using the method of monthly sessions where one person would present on what they do and how they do it. Also, that person was required to discuss the training they received online. The floor was opened after the presentation to other people in the INTRATERNSHIP programme to comment or suggest alternative ways to perform certain task.
Similarly, the technical staff were required to hold similar training sessions. The discussions were designed to facilitate a greater knowledge-sharing process on the workshop floor. It provided peers with the confidence to ask for help or offer help when it was requested or not requested.
The cross-disciplinary process was not so much about job function sharing but more about how each department is interdependent. The entire sales cycle is automated. Automation removes the personal nature of a working eco-system. People know how to press a button, but they often didn’t understand how this process impacted the whole company, from marketing to sales to finance to service etc. TW wanted to show the various departments how dependent they were on each other. Automation and systems don’t take personalities into account. The human side of these departments also needed to be nurtured. These INTRATERNSHIPS were less about knowledge sharing than they were about how the departments understood their relevance in the delivery chain.
The INTRATERNSHIP process is ongoing. There is always something else that can be shared and taught.