Caroline Mondon, coach and Partner Visconti, today welcomes Baptiste Gendron, founding president of Yelhow. Yelhow is a start-up that designs software to manage the flow of skills and versatility.

Skill flow definition

Flow is flow. There are four flows that are essential to the life of a business:

- The flow of information: forecasts, customer orders, production order, alerts when there are quality problems, etc.

- Financial flow: cash or cash and the famous working capital and working capital requirements: Excess working capital is the main cause of the death of SMEs in France

- Physical flow: raw materials, sub-assemblies, finished products and associated services

- The flow of skills: who has the skills, to whom to transmit them, how, when?

The Manager is the conductor of these flows. Its role is to coordinate them harmoniously to avoid breakdowns that penalize customers, and at the same time, ensure the profitability of the processes that support these flows.

It is thanks to the good coordination of flows that the company's supply chain creates value and thus becomes the dynamic lever for the implementation of the manager's strategy.

Who is Baptiste Gendron?

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Baptiste Gendron, an engineer by training, is a serial entrepreneur. He has been working in the industry for fifteen years. Its specialty is industrial software.

What does the Yelhow company do?

Yelhow's mission is to contribute to making businesses more efficient and resilient.
Thanks to real-time processing of information from the field, Yelhow realizes the match between production needs and available skills.

Yelhow has two jobs:

- Publisher and designer of industrial software. They help women and men in the field in their daily lives with visual, simple, mobile digital tools.

This is how a skills, versatility and training management solution called Alex and an operational planning solution called Tim were developed.

- Support for manufacturers in change management to implement the strategy for the development of people, skills and the transmission of knowledge.

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What made Baptiste want to create his company Yelhow?

This desire was born from a meeting with the industrialist Daher who opened the doors of a hundred factories around the world where he operates. This laboratory allowed Baptiste to observe the condition of the factories. It was easy for him to note that all the investment is placed in machines and not in people, even though they are the key players in the smooth flow of flows in the company.

What did Baptiste observe as a result of this observation?

Recurring problems, encountered regardless of the size of the company and its sector of activity:

Here are three:

- First problem: the systematic differences during certification audits between versatility matrices and the reality on the ground.
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The reason is simple: the amount of data.

For a team of one hundred employees who have a hundred skills, qualifications and know-how, that's 10,000 daily measurement points to monitor.

Add to that changing teams and evolving processes. As a result, Excel tables are never up to date.

- Second problem: turnover and massive retirements that lead to losses of know-how. People stay in the same company for less time, temporary workers are used a lot and there is a significant proportion of people who retire without transmitting knowledge.

- Third problem: the training of new recruits, the famous “onboarding”.

What consequences does this have on flows?

The first problem mentioned results in versatility matrices that are not up to date. This means that the flow of information is broken. However, operational decisions are made from this matrix to assign people to the activities of the sites.

The impact can then be a certification not obtained or even accidents when unqualified people are put on positions.
For the second problem, that of departures: here it is the flow of skills that is interrupted.

It can then take two years to learn how to operate a station again, to adjust a machine...

The third problem results in poorly trained people who cause quality and productivity problems. These problems generate overstock and therefore unnecessary financial mobilization.

In addition to these problems that disrupt business flows, there are disruptions due to the variabilities of the industrial world, which have increased considerably in recent years. Supply chains have become very complex since globalization (supply disruptions, talent shortages, etc.).

What is Baptiste's solution in the face of this growing complexity?

Introduce agility to stabilize these flow variations.

Yelhow focuses on developing team agility to ensure business performance and resilience.
The key is versatility that promotes collective intelligence to find solutions.

Thanks to versatility, when people occupy different positions, they better understand where the flow is coming from and where it is going and can therefore better protect it.

How does Baptiste propose to solve these universal problems?

According to him, these problems can be solved with the people in the field.

At Yelhow, digital tools are designed with the employees who need them, around a co-design methodology, with phases of observation, ideation, prototyping throughout the software life cycle to ensure a perfect match between the user and the tool.

They have thus developed visual, collaborative and mobile tools for the field.

This applies to the three problems mentioned above:

Solution to the first problem: digitalization and visual management so that versatility matrices become a management tool and not a control tool.

This involves:

- Digitize employee skills and training evidence to ensure traceability, archiving and centralization of data

- Provide internal trainers and HR with an app to carry out training and collect evidence

- Provide interactive versatility matrices

The versatility matrix is therefore always up to date.

Solution to the second problem: mapping and the transmission of know-how

This involves:

- Formalize the role of internal trainer and value it, that is to say recognize it

- Give a simple, visual mobile app for the expert trainer to share his know-how and create training plans that he improves over time

Solution to the third problem: training and developing versatility

This involves:

- When a new collaborator joins the team, assign him to one or more positions with an objective and his personalized training plan by consolidating safety, quality and training standards for the position

- Use the Alex search engine to find a replacement when an employee is ill. Alex is responsible for finding a qualified collaborator in the other teams by checking the authorization dates.

- Use the forecasting engine that gives the upcoming training load plan and put it in line with the production plan

- Plan the strategic plan for the training of skills upgrades over three years.

This is about doing GPEC (Previsional Job and Career Management) with real time field data.

All managers and their HR managers once dreamed of this direct, real-time access to data on field activities. What is the “secret sauce”: the secret to making it work?

The secret is the internal trainers, valued in the same way as managers by managers. When they teach, they drive the virtuous circle of continuous improvement and they introduce innovations.

They team up with managers to keep flows flowing through their up-to-date data sharing.

Does Baptiste use Artificial Intelligence and, if so, how?

AI and Machine Learning have existed for forty years but today we have large amounts of data and very fast machines in our possession, so we are able to extract more interesting results.
For example, we have the ability to:

- Offer training based on the productivity of people or the number of quality defects measured in real time and compared to Gaussian ones

- Propose versatility goals per team based on past and future workload plans and taking into account people's leave and absences

- Set up an intelligent schedule to maintain skills with regular practices

AI is very useful because it analyzes past data to offer future options.

To conclude, here are 3 recommendations:

1. Faced with the complexity of supply chains in an uncertain world and the increasing turnover of employees, internal trainers are at the heart of value creation in the company. They ensure both continuous improvement and the introduction of innovations.
2. To Managers and their HR Director: monitor the versatility of employees in real time and anticipate the versatility of employees. Mobile digital tools assisted by artificial intelligence allow this. This recognized and encouraged versatility will then become a driver of business performance, agility and resilience.
3. Use a visual tool for monitoring training and versatility that is accessible to everyone, like a real open book on the collective intelligence of the company.

This is the key to the success of YELHOW: in a simple, transparent and structured way, this innovation allows the flow of skills to create the conditions for the sustainability of the company.