Skills management software is designed to track the workforce’s skills, competencies, experiences, and knowledge. When searching for the right technology, leaders may consider their traditional HR systems, a homegrown skills management system, or a dedicated skills tech solution. With a growing number of technology choices, it’s important to remember that the top skills management platform for your organization will track and manage skills and continuously evolve to meet the needs of your business.
Kahuna skills management software focuses on skills management as a business process, handling the complexity of skills in manufacturing, energy, field service, and healthcare.
Our skills management software connects leaders across Human Resources, Learning & Development, and Operations with validated skills data, helping businesses understand how their workforce skills and capabilities align with overall operational goals.
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SKILLS MATRIX TEMPLATE
Equip Your Business With the Right Skills for Current and Future Demands
Build a skills framework that fully reflects the needs of your business today and in the future so your workforce can meet the demands of the ever-changing operational environment.
How Kahuna Compares to Other Skills Management Platforms
Homegrown Systems Aren’t Scalable and Cost More to Maintain
Organizations often try to build an in-house skills and competency management system through paper files, Excel spreadsheets, or custom-built applications. They often fail. This failure can occur because of a variety of reasons. For example:
- Lack of resources to focus on the project
- Shifting business priorities and lack of project champion or process
- Disparate data across the organization
- Inability to evolve homegrown technology as the organization grows
- Failure to scale the program or systems across the business and operating environments
Industrial Supply Magazine explains that supporting a homegrown or in-house system can be costly, miss out on innovation opportunities, have data discrepancies and security risks, and lack integration functionally. “While on the surface, remaining on a homegrown system may appear to be the least risky choice, there are many underlying challenges and trade-offs associated — and there is often a price tag attached.”
If an in-house system fails, the organization wastes ample funds, time, and resources building out processes and coordinating projects.
As a SaaS platform, Kahuna is dedicated to:
- Offering a skills management system and customer service that helps organizations understand their workforce skills and capabilities
- Evolving the technology to continually serve and meet the business’s operational needs
- Streamlining the skills curation, assignment, assessment, and development processes in one single platform rather than disparate locations
- Providing a user-friendly interface for users across the organization
- Helping organizations scale the program throughout the entire organization, regardless of location
- Supporting organizational resources in achieving their skills and competency management goals for their business and workforce
Traditional HR Systems Can’t Solve the Skills Problem
Often, organizational leaders are charged with solving the skills problem in their business with existing talent technologies such as Workday, Oracle, SAP Success Factors, Cornerstone, etc. However, these traditional systems weren’t built on skills and they can’t handle the granularity or complexity of technical skills taxonomies, multi-modal assessment processes, multi-level proficiency scales, or validation processes needed in operationally focused environments. These applications see skills and competencies as supporting attributes to the business processes they support (i.e., hiring, orientation and onboarding, training, etc.). Kahuna sees skills and competencies as a business process of their own.
Josh Bersin says, “The ERP vendors (Oracle, SAP, Workday, others) are the least sophisticated, so they are more likely to become “skills aggregators” with APIs to coordinate skills data between these more specialized systems and their internal machine learning models.”
Our skills management platform was developed with the explicit purpose of addressing the skills issue. It enables organizations to customize their competency frameworks, job roles, assessment processes, proficiency levels, and development plans according to their specific operational needs. This ensures that skills and competency data accurately represent the workforce’s training, knowledge, and experience.
Rather than replace your existing HR technology stack, Kahuna is complimentary. The platform’s ability to ingest data from throughout the business brings employee skills data to life, providing more granular, meaningful, and actionable insights for employees, managers, and leaders as business decisions are made.
Other Skills Tech Is Plug-And-Lay, Not Operationally Focused
Organizations working to understand the skills makeup of their technical workforce and solve complex operational problems don’t need a plug-and-play, one-size-fits-all, or AI-driven approach to skills and competency management. Platforms such as Ag5, Skills-Base, TalentGuard, or Augmentir tout this as a solution to the skills problem.
Kahuna’s skills management platform is completely customizable and flexible and ingests data in the way your business runs. Whether your operations are globally dispersed or on the same floor, different job roles, business functions, and individuals have varying skill needs, training assignments, and compliance requirements.
Our team works alongside you to ensure each element of your skills program is mapped out in Kahuna to drive value for individuals and the business.
Why Is Kahuna the Top Skills Management Platform?
Serving Complex Operating Environments
For organizations in technical operating environments, a lack of proficiency or compliance can be costly in lives, dollars, or operational efficiencies. In building a skills-based organization, “some skills must be verified: entire platforms like Kahuna let you decide who can validate skills and when they have to be revalidated…and other skills need assessments: built on leadership, management, and other soft-skill models,” says Josh Bersin.
Imagine a manufacturing company with hundreds of machines, each requiring operational expertise in starting, operating, tuning, repairing, and shutting down equipment. Consider a hospital NICU where healthcare providers must be fluent in neonatal resuscitation, pharmacology, or infection control for premature infants and ill newborns. Think about an offshore oil rig where individuals have to understand drilling operations, well control, safety procedures, equipment maintenance, and emergency response. In these types of environments, a company can quickly develop a library of hundreds or even thousands of competencies across the workforce.
A platform capable of ingesting large and complex data sets, with scalable user counts depending on organizational needs, is essential. It enables organizations to obtain the granular workforce insights they need to streamline processes, prove compliance, ensure quality, enable proficiency, prioritize safety, and control costs in operationally focused environments.
Case Study: Standardize Skills, Training, and Operational Processes
One Kahuna manufacturing customer’s data spans 980 job roles with over 14,000 competencies across nine global plant sites. Learn how they streamline their skills, training, and operational processes with Kahuna.
Integrations Are Seamless
Kahuna’s integration functionality is standard in the platform, providing leaders with a more holistic and actionable understanding of workforce skills and capabilities. Kahuna integrates seamlessly with systems across the organization, including but not limited to:
- Human Resource Information System (HRIS)
- Human Capital Management (HCM)
- Learning Management System (LMS)
- Learning Experience System (LXP)
- Planning and Analytics
- Scheduling, Ticketing, or Badging Systems
- Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR)
This connected data allows HR, L&D, and Operational leaders seamless data transfer, improved workflows, and enhanced reporting. It also enables more connected and informed workforce decision-making in line with business needs.
Second-To-None Customer Support
Kahuna’s customer support is second to none. Each team member is committed to our customer’s success from the first conversation to implementation, deployment, and beyond. Kahuna provides global support and product enhancements, all oriented to streamline and simplify skills management processes and meet customer needs.
Produces Actionable, Validated Skills Data
From Kahuna’s inception, we have been thinking about skills and competency management differently than any other vendor. Kahuna fills a gap in the market, solving problems organizations face daily, that other platforms couldn’t (and still can’t) solve — skills and competency management in operationally-focused environments. While other vendors focus on AI-inferred skills or consolidating self-reported skills, Kahuna produces validated skills data from your existing tech stack, assessment processes, and compliance requirements. This data guides leaders as they meet business needs and align their workforce to perform on the plant floor, in the field, on the oil rig, or at the bedside.
Want to learn more about Kahuna’s top skills management platform? Talk to a skills advisor for more information!
