Holcim Mexico engages over 95% of employees across a diverse workforce

Holcim Mexico, a world leader in construction solutions, is a company with more than 90 years of history in Mexico, and is reinventing the way we build the world to make it greener, smarter and healthier for everyone. Producing and marketing cement, ready-mix concrete, aggregates (gravel and sand) and other products and services.

Holcim Mexico produces and markets cement, ready-mix concrete, aggregates (gravel and sand) and other construction products and services. The company has a nationwide presence through 7 cement plants and a milling plant with a current installed capacity to produce 13.3 million tons per year, 37 cement distribution centers, 1 corporate office, more than 50 ready-mix concrete plants, 7 Geocycle platforms, 25 commercial partners with more than 90 ready-mix concrete plants, more than 500 stirrer pots, 2 aggregate plants, a Center for Technological Innovation for Construction (CITEC) and the Holcim Mexico A.C. Foundation.

The Challenge

With such a diverse population, Holcim Mexico’s day-to-day challenge is to be able to adequately train each of our employees.

The biggest challenge of this mission was to engage employees at a specific point in time. Because the plants cannot stop their operation, it was necessary to coordinate various crews with different schedules so that they could attend the face-to-face training. For this reason, taking a course had become quite complex, and therefore only a low percentage of employees was trained, leaving them at risk of workplace accidents. The need to keep all employees trained on critical health and safety issues prompted Holcim Mexico to implement innovative strategies to achieve a change in the capacities of the employees and visitors of the plants.

The Solution

Holcim Mexico partnered with Aura Interactiva to implement Totara Learn, and managed to create a training program adhering to Holcim Mexico’s “security” value, ensuring that everyone could access the platform through different devices, including PCs and mobile phones, thus optimizing and improving staff productivity.

Reporting was a crucial point for Holcim Mexico, so Totara Learn’s reporting functionality was set up to provide detailed and clear reports on the time spent on health and safety training, with additional data on the topics of inclusion and diversity, data by gender and position/organization.

Totara Learn is a user-friendly platform offering innovative and dynamic training, thanks to the fact that it incorporates technology into each step of Holcim Mexico’s training process. Information is accessed quickly, and the schedule flexibility is also an advantage, since the user can enter at any time and on any device, along with having the ability to retake courses when necessary.

Certifications are an essential part of the training process for regulatory issues. By setting certification expiration times in Totara Learn, employees were able to re-certify in when required. This functionality has enabled a decrease in content update times.

Due to the favorable results obtained in the health and safety courses, the platform’s content offering was expanded, and in turn the number of users who are trained in Totara has practically tripled by adding new departments to the initiative. This started with the legal area, human resources and innovation, and soon even other countries will be joining this great initiative.

The Results

The best result for Holcim was achieving a significant increase in employees’ involvement in training, with over 95% of employees having completed the training courses.

With the help of the integrations, Totara Learn helped Holcim Mexico save administrative time, thus allowing them to concentrate efforts on creating valuable content for students. This in turn helped them increase the content offering by more than 300% in just two years.

Another advantage is the economic savings that the company realized, since various expenses are avoided in each of the plants, headquarters, and offices. These savings include infrastructure and equipment no longer needed for training, such as blackboards, projectors, supplies, and exclusive spaces dedicated to face-to-face training.

“In Holcim México, health and safety is our overarching value and embedded in everything we do. The implementation of Totara Learn has come to significantly foster our values, generating visible and genuine leadership across the organization.”
– Oscar Araya Sanchez, Health, Safety & Environment Director, Holcim México