Katoen Natie’s CG&I business unit improves learning and performance management

Founded in 1854, Katoen Natie started as a cotton guild and has since grown into one of the largest full-service suppliers of logistics and technical solutions. The company counts over 18,000 employees in 35 countries. Despite its tremendous growth throughout the years, Katoen Natie remains a family business at heart that takes pride in the added value they deliver, their organisational culture and their employees.

The Challenge

Katoen Natie strongly believes that its people make the difference. Therefore, the company invests many resources in the development and performance of their employees in order to cultivate an environment where critical minds can flourish and feel supported.

This emphasis on employee development and performance, as well as their expanding workforce prompted the business unit Consumer Goods & Industry (CG&I) at Katoen Natie to start their search for an LMS. Up until that point, all learning & development data was tracked manually in different spreadsheets, and performance evaluations were done on paper. This created a lot of administrative burden and complicated reporting and analysis. Consequently, the CG&I business unit decided to investigate ways to digitise and automate these processes.

The Solution

After carefully considering various contenders, the CG&I business unit of Katoen Natie decided that Totara would best fit their needs. Totara was not unknown to Katoen Natie. Their location in Singapore had already been using this software since 2020. What really tipped the scales, though, was Totara’s great price/quality ratio and the flexibility it offers. In order to leverage this flexibility to the maximum, Katoen Natie decided to partner with Deloitte, which provided a team of Totara experts and experienced developers that guided them through every step of the process.

Together with Deloitte, Katoen Natie implemented both Totara Lear and Totara Perform in their CG&I business unit. The combination of these two modules allows them to closely track and manage learning and performance, in order to help employees to grow their skill set and remain compliant with company requirements.

Katoen Natie offers training to both blue- and white-collar employees across multiple departments. Therefore, they make frequent use of (certificatio) programmes and audiences to provide tailored learning materials.Thanks to Totara Perform, Katoen Natie can follow up on coaching and feedback processes more easily, leaving evaluations on paper in the past. By setting up different audiences, they can tailor these processes to their diverse workforce. In addition, the platform automatically tracks competency development based on completed programmes and courses. This allows managers to keep an overview of their team’s development to identify and close skill gaps early on.

Furthermore, each business unit at Katoen Natie consists of multiple sites. This is no different for the CG&I business unit. Therefore, they decided to set up multitenancy on their platform. Segmenting the LMS into tenants enables each site to have its own way of working in terms of managing users, learning, and performance and ensures privacy protection. While the platform uses a general catalogue that allows each user to see which learning materials are on offer across the entire business unit, learners can only access those courses and programmes that belong to their tenant, and user data remains within each tenant. Similarly, each site manages its own performance evaluations, without having to share that data outside of its tenant.

The Results

Katoen Natie has upgraded, simplified and automated both learning and performance management. The administrative burden of tracking everything in various spreadsheets or on paper has been lifted. The business unit now has an easy overview of all internal and external training completed by their 5500 blue-and white-collar employees, as well as the employees’ competency development and performance data. This helps GC&I to ensure that their workforce keeps growing their skill set and remains compliant with training and certification requirements.

Thanks to Totara’s flexibility and Deloitte’s team of Totara experts, Katoen Natie was able to create a Talent Experience Platform that is easy to use and completely tailored to their organizational structure and the needs of their diverse employees.

The implementation has been such a success, that other business units at Katoen Natie have now also started their own Totara implementations, relying again on the help of Totara Platinum Partner Deloitte.

“The nice thing about Totara is how customisable it is. It allows you to go beyond the standard functionalities of the platform, without having to touch the core code.”

– Marijke De Paepe, Human Resources at Katoen Natie

“We’ve really enjoyed having Deloitte at our side throughout this process. They are fully engaged every step of the way, to make sure our ideas and requirements are realised. They also ensure that we have a lot of autonomy on the platform. They share their knowledge, rather than keeping it in-house.”

– Marijke De Paepe, Human Resources at Katoen Natie