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November 02, 2021

Johnson Controls exceeds enterprise training expectations with scalable solution built on Power Platform

Johnson Controls’ 136-year history of innovation propels its ability to do what the company does best—make buildings smarter. It enhances the environments where people live, learn, work, and play. Serving four million customers in 150 countries, more than 100,000 Johnson Controls employees create and deploy systems and digital solutions that optimize building performance, safety, sustainability, and comfort. 
 

As Johnson Controls continues its track record as a leader in the industry, its drive to provide superior service requires consistent training on the enterprise level—and ways to track, measure, and analyze progress. Utilizing Microsoft Power Platform, specifically Power Automate, Power Apps, and Power BI, Johnson Controls is building a new class of training deployment and tracking solutions—solutions that provide operational excellence, increase key measurement accuracy, and accelerate agility.

Johnson Controls

Disparate training systems hindering major rollout

Johnson Controls’ Building Solutions Group in North America (BSNA) has domain over a broad portfolio of HVAC-, fire-, and security-focused products and solutions. BSNA is deploying a massive system-wide training initiative across the entire North American field organization to harmonize field work across its domains. The initiative, SEDU (Service Excellence Digitize and Unify), ties 20,000 customer-facing employees to a central system to schedule, dispatch, and trace service. 

The deployment of this training fell upon the Security Domain Training and Quality Department, which has rapidly expanded its purview into the other BSNA areas over recent times. Execution of SEDU deployment Wave 1 started in January of 2020 with immediate signs that the few training deployment tracking systems available throughout the Johnson Controls enterprise were not robust enough to handle the effort. Wave 1 impacts 5,000 employees, with Waves 2 and 3 at 7,000 and 8,000, respectively. The deployment of this critical initiative was faltering at the mercy of siloed, cumbersome, and inconsistent tracking and reporting methods.

The Training and Quality Department supports deployment and tracking of training initiatives and is all too familiar with dealing with the fallout of disparate deployment and tracking efforts. Cody Hines, Training and Quality Data Systems Manager at Johnson Controls, states, “Our training department had been managing scheduling of instructor-led events through disparate systems for years. Some event details were tracked in Excel, some were in SmartSheet, some using SharePoint or Exchange Calendars.” This led to inconsistency in approach as well to significant delays and days of manual tracking to compile quarterly reporting on training initiatives overall. 

Manual intervention on every level was required, from determining who needed training, to scheduling, to deploying trainers, to initiating follow-up activities, to surveying trainees. Christa Ogle, Training Design and Development Manager, BSNA at Johnson Controls, leads SEDU’s 20 trainers. She laments, “It was a very manual affair…emailing spreadsheets back and forth. It was hard to get managers to comply because they get so many emails. Managing any changes was a frustrating deal.” There was no mechanism in place to share or aggregate information within systems or received from trainees. Manual intervention was the default reaction. Minor, but common, errors, such as misspellings, abbreviations, and incomplete responses, added to aggregation aggravation. 

Additionally, Johnson Controls uses SurveyMonkey to obtain trainee feedback and develop post-event NPS (Net Promotor Scores) for all trainings, including SEDU. NPS scores reflect the quality of the training experience and are a major key performance indicator (KPI) for the department. The surveys provide critical data, but they had to be manually requested and often took an hour per training session to administer. 

John Mendicino, Training & Quality Assurance Associate Director at Johnson Controls, had lower confidence in the NPS scores since sending surveys manually was “hit or miss.” Delayed or unsent surveys reduced the reliability of NPS scores. Mendicino wanted a way to standardize SurveyMonkey transmittal prior to course completion to achieve higher response rates. 

Getting to the heart of the issue — simplify and standardize to gain insights

Johnson Controls’ complex training infrastructure did not support the pace and precision required. Department leaders needed a way for trainers to focus on training and reduce time devoted to manually intensive, error-prone administrative tasks. They needed a way to track results accurately and easily, so leadership had insight on what was happening and how initiatives were faring. They needed a way to gather data and communicate outcomes and status to and from multiple systems. All levels needed visibility to data to identify or verify opportunities for improvement and create a scalable approach.

Hines knew Johnson Controls needed an end-to-end training solution to normalize training data into relational systems so it would be accessible and exportable. This would resolve major pain points, including reporting on initiatives and providing trainers a significantly more user-friendly interface and significantly less manual work.

OK to excellent — leveraging low code to accelerate and customize a seamless solution

Hines is responsible for monitoring quality and has a history of diving in to build the know-how he needs to resolve issues like the one facing the company on SEDU training deployment. He knew that to increase quality of tracking results he needed to fix the tracking system. He found out-of-the-box solutions did not offer flexibility—and without extensive resources and funding for enterprise framework solutions, he would not have the functionality required. He needed to build a business application faster and easier, and based on his experience, he saw Microsoft Power Platform as the solution.

Hines became familiar with Power Platform several years ago when Johnson Controls moved to Microsoft 365. He had a lot of experience in Microsoft SharePoint and SharePoint customization and saw how Power Platform interacted with SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, and other applications in heavy use. “Once you learn one aspect of Power Platform, other aspects become fairly intuitive…it’s pretty easy to get out of beginner stage and into the next level.” Hines easily developed that next-level understanding and started utilizing Power Apps and Power Automate regularly.

Hines used Power Apps and Power Automate to create COBALT (Central Ops Buildings Administered Learning Tracker.) It is an end-to-end system to deploy and track training. It was used in its first iteration to successfully handle six to eight new-hire training events per month. Hines brought on Trenton Corcoran, Data Systems Coordinator at Johnson Controls, to help him expand and customize COBALT to ultimately handle 60 to 100 (or more) training events per month. Having the solution in the cloud proved essential for Hines and Corcoran to collaborate remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic.

It took about three months to build COBALT for its first application, new-hire training, and another three months to customize for the much larger SEDU deployment. 

Through Power Platform, Hines found that extending and connecting to both internal ecosystems, such as Teams and SharePoint, as well as external sources, such as SurveyMonkey, was possible with low-code development. Hines now had the keys to rationalize data and unlock all the upstream benefits that would accompany it. 

Putting Power Platform to work

COBALT unifies all training deployment and tracking activities into one beautiful process. Remotely.

All data is consolidated into a single Microsoft SQL Server on-premises database and connected to Power Platform using an on-premises data gateway. Courses, trainers, events, locations, and survey methods are standardized in relational fashion in a Power Apps app, allowing management of scheduling and participant rosters. This eliminates manual data collection. Hines explains, "Utilizing SQL served two purposes. First, it let us effortlessly integrate with business data we were already employing. Second, the horsepower gained from stored procedures, SSIS, and SSRS gave us easy methods to address complex and heavy tasks for data handling.” In summary, “Having a back end that could do the heavy lifting left us free to use Power Automate for complex distinct tasks."

Outlook integration through Power Automate creates shared calendar events and manages invites for participants and instructors, as well as reminders of pre-work required prior to training. Office 365 user parsing ensures all participants added to an event are recorded using their system-specified email/login and correctly spelled name. This ensures name consistency across data from other systems for business analytics. All users align to the Global Directory in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD).

Trainers are now able to bulk-enroll trainees, a major productivity enhancement. These participants are then provisioned in an Azure AD user group that is also used for access to training software and other event materials.

Trainees receive a Teams meeting invite in Outlook and follow-up email confirming registration and highlighting pre-work. A Power Automate flow ensures required applications are forwarded for download prior to a training upon the trainee sign-up. This is a major productivity enhancement for IT provisioning—it had been a manual process with high variability. Five-day and one-day training reminders are automatically sent in advance of training triggered by Power Automate.

The application is wizard-driven, so hierarchy is consistent and data errors are virtually nonexistent. Power BI reports SurveyMonkey results and provides completion rate, drop codes, and a more secure look at NPS trends. 

COBALT solution screen
Screenshots from COBALT application showing key SEDU training event information, including graduation status, trainer, location, status, dates, and more.

Hines uses an API to link SurveyMonkey to the application and schedules automated flows in Power Automate to send surveys prior to training end, increasing response rate significantly. A clickable email is sent via Microsoft Outlook so participants can complete training events and provide their feedback in a seamless and automated fashion. SurveyMonkey has always been a critical, but standalone, tool for Johnson Controls’ training efforts—now it’s fully integrated. 

Automated flows schedule surveys using a SurveyMonkey http/API call and retrieve the results daily. Integrated dashboarding using Power BI allows instructors to track their graduation rates and survey scores. Power BI dashboards review and analyze execution efforts to empower systemic improvements. Hines, Mendicino, Ogle, and other leaders are empowered to do more with their business data.

COBALT solution benefits
Power BI report highlighting NPS scores as well as detailed comments provided. Future plans include deeper analytics and sentiment analysis to enhance the value of these types of reports even further.

Training results reporting
Power BI report showing graduation/dropped rates by training and reasons why.

Hines controls access and can centralize management of security administration. Access to the application is all handled via Microsoft Azure Active Directory group membership and resources are locked in SQL server with specific limited local user account permissions used in any connections. 

There is no personally identifiable information (PII) accessed apart from Office 365 properties. The exception would be survey results, which are technically performance data for any given instructor. These are limited via Power BI row-level security (RLS) to self-visibility with the only exception being access for department management. Access to any portion of the system is handled strictly as need-to-know.

Hines has been able to scale with confidence—adding the innovation required for SEDU while maintaining security and adding centralized governance. Utilizing Power Platform allowed for integration with trusted and already familiar platforms, including Teams, Outlook, and SharePoint. 

Hines and Johnson Controls now have a mission critical app with advance functionality and endless possibilities to meet coming priorities.

Results are through the roof as training participant capacity grows

Hines shares, “The system was originally built for our department’s 30-ish participants per month. The framework allowed us to tackle the rollout of SEDU, boosting the value. If it weren’t for COBALT built on Power Platform, I’m unsure if we could have accomplished the task.” The COBALT solution is supporting training for more than 1,200 participants per month, with that number expected to increase substantially over the next 12 to 24 months.

Hines summarizes, “This system has reduced the need for multiple logins and eliminated significant portions of administrative overhead for instructors and program administrators. Data is streamlined and normalized across the platform to nearly eliminate data cleanup tasks required from free-text typos and uncommon indexes/keys. Performance data is clean, quickly accessible through Power BI or SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), and continues to evolve into more and more usable data elements for KPI production.”

With the automation of survey requests, on-time execution has increased from 80 percent to 99.99 percent. Mendicino shares the impact of this improvement: “Higher response rate gives me confidence that my NPS numbers are accurate." Mendicino goes on, saying, “Power Platform has enabled my training team to be more productive and has eliminated frustrating manual processes, allowing our trainers to focus on what matters most: our students and their learning outcomes.” He reflects that the decrease in stress is palpable.

Christa Ogle, Training Design and Development Manager, echoes others’ delight with the new system: “It’s just brilliant.” She has visibility into her trainers’ schedules and has been able to eliminate double-booking instructors. The administrative workload to manage scheduling has been all but eliminated, freeing time for strategic improvement. Instead of having to log in to multiple systems, trainers only need log in to one solution. Roster completion lag has decreased from seven to 10 days down to 24 hours. “There hasn't been a question that I've asked Cody that he hasn't been able to answer or provide the data to tell the story that I need to tell,” beams Ogle. Reporting response has decreased from five days to 24 hours. Ogle and Hines are in regular communication discussing opportunities and enhancements. Certain requests are handled and built into COBALT in a matter of minutes.

Another benefit is the additional processes and objectives that have been positively impacted with a rationalized training deployment and tracking system. The provisioning team now receives accurate lists of employees needing equipment or applications. Trainers now have visibility-enabling, efficient planning. Everyone can see who’s expected where and when and can address in real time if there’s an issue. Mendicino comments, “Registrations and associated reporting have been praised across the board for accuracy and ease of use. It is an amazing system!”

Back-office managerial overhead covering scheduling, reporting, surveying, and roster management is down significantly from 2.33 FTEs (4870 hours) to .5 FTEs (1160 hours). Quarterly reporting previously required six to 10 hours of manual data cleanup, with specific team reporting needs taking up to a week to fulfill. Team members are now able to reliably extract their own data on a self-serve, as-needed basis for their status reports. Measures that were previously only practical on a quarterly basis can now be reported at the weekly or monthly level.

The impetus for automating the process, getting better data, and quicker reporting has been met, but equally important is Power Platform’s ability to provide extendibility and to enable continuous improvement. “That's the beauty of Power Platform: it is extensible,” notes Hines. “If you stay normalized with your data structure you can extend out easily and connect out to additional resources.” 

The team tackles improvements as needed. Two notable opportunities came up after rollout of SEDU. A series of check step reminders are emailed if training does not progress along the expected timeline. A clickable email lets the trainer know of the status issue and provides the opportunity to address. Another hang-up was that some surveys were getting deleted prior to completion because they appeared to be spam coming directly from SurveyMonkey. Now a pre-notification email is sent with an identifying code phrase, letting the recipient know the survey is legitimate and should be completed.

Creating a sustainable future

Results have been so superior that they’re changing how the department thinks about solving issues. Mendicino shares, “Power platform has made it so easy to automate and manage processes and quantify business results that any time a new challenge comes to us, we all immediately ask how automation, reporting, and/or workflows can address it.”

The team is partially through the first of three waves of SEDU training and will use the solution for the other two waves. It is considering building a companion app on Power Apps to bring the process to field tech supervisors so they can self-schedule technicians for this and other trainings. Ogle is very pleased with the system, but also thinks about the next improvement opportunity. She sees being able to use it for training optimization—identifying by geography where compliance issues are a potential risk and then having the ability to rectify proactively, understanding capability by market on new initiatives, and deploying training accordingly. 

The group is considering several Azure services to facilitate additional seamless integration. As the feedback and survey process has improved, the group would like to look at going deeper on analytics with sentiment analysis.

Mendicino highlights, “This is a testament to Power Platform itself and Cody's work within it. Every problem we've surfaced has been solved, whether it's simply sending an email or going through an automated data validation process to produce a targeted data set. My eyes have been opened as to what's possible.”

Hines sums it up: “We’ve embraced the self-serve kind of opportunities like Microsoft Power Platform without having to do the top-end deployment and the things that are native with any type of scaled deployment. It’s really changed our business. It has been instrumental in our ability to scale.” 

“Power Platform has enabled my training team to be more productive and has eliminated frustrating manual processes, allowing our trainers to focus on what matters most: our students and their learning outcomes.”

John Mendicino, Training & Quality Assurance Associate Director, Johnson Controls

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