Procurement training program is alive and thriving at International Paper
By William Atkinson -- Purchasing, 4/30/2009 2:00:00 AM EDT
In a lot of companies, procurement training programs are often like safety programs—details sit in a dusty binder on a shelf somewhere for reference when someone needs to see it, which they rarely do. But when it comes to procurement training at International Paper in Memphis, Tenn., there are no dusty binders on office shelves. Instead, its procurement training program is alive, vibrant, exciting and personal—even at a time when resources for such programs are hard to come by.
"We had a traditional training program for years, but it just didn't work well," reports Larry Simmons, manager of sourcing initiatives and development at International Paper. "It was a passive program, it had almost no structure, and retention was awful." In fact, according to Simmons, the company lost almost everyone who came into the program.
"One reason was that we were just 'staging' people, rather than developing them," he states. "There was no structure to keep people, especially younger people."
About seven years ago, the vice president of sourcing asked Simmons to take over the training program. The two put their heads together and found some ways to make the program better—much better. And it has continued to get better over the years.
"We realized that the first thing we had to do was to breathe some life into the program," he states. "This meant shifting from staging people to developing them." In the pulp and paper industry, according to Simmons, individuals tend to stay at the facilities where they were first hired, and tend to stay there for many years. "Getting them to transfer to the corporate office was difficult," he says.
To address this challenge, the company made the decision to hire new purchasing people at the corporate level, and then train them in the individual facilities via a rotational process. The program involves a specific training plan for the new person at the first location. Then, to ensure continuity, the program is set up such that the training that the person receives at the second location of the rotation builds on the first training, and the training at the third builds on the second.
Using this approach, the company has been able to compress years of experience from six down to two. "Before the program, when we needed people with experience at corporate, we used to bring in people who already had four to six years experience in the different locations," explains Simmons. However, the company found that bringing them in this way wasn't giving it what it needed.
With the new program, the goal was to give new people six years of experience via just two years of training. "Instead of hiring someone as a buyer at a facility, and then bringing them to corporate after six years, we can now get someone with that same level of experience after just two years of our rotational training program," Simmons says.
The rotational program provides experience in purchasing; exposure to other functions in the facility, since the trainees get involved in facility projects; and corporate networking, since they get involved in corporate enterprise projects and other new initiatives. Participants are involved in the support of mill outages, do peer reviews and gain experience with audit and finance teams, according to Simmons.
"After two years, they have a lot of experience with a lot of different functions and have had a lot of face time with a lot of individuals across the company," he says.
This represented a significant change. Previously, the company might have hired a buyer at a facility, and that person might have done the same job in the same way for two years or so before anyone even thought of having that person do anything else. Over the last seven years, the company has worked to fine-tune the program every six to twelve months, in order to get it to where it is today. One result is that, instead of being a 30-month program as it once was, it now only takes 24 months made up of three eight-month rotations. "One reason we were able to do this is that we use the purchasing managers as supervisors in our mill facilities," Simmons says. "Over the years, as they get better at being in these roles, it ends up taking less time for them to get people through the program." In addition, in the different departments in the facilities, the mentors are also getting more used to working with people as they pass through training.
The results are measured in several ways, but most notably the retention rate. Seven years ago, the attrition rate during the program was, in the words of Simmons, "atrocious." Since the new program, the company has only lost two people, out of a total of 35. "And the reasons they left weren't because of the company," he says. Both were related to personal issues.
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