Clients

P&H Mining Equipment

Milwaukee, Wisconsin | 2,700 employees

Click here for additional description of McBassi's work at P&H Mining.

The Need

With 120 years of history, P&H Mining Equipment has seen its share of good times and bad. Long recognized as the world's leading manufacturer of mining equipment, P&H is synonymous with reliability and cost-effectiveness. Therein lies one of its greatest challenges; so effective has it been in driving down clients' cost through bigger and better machinery, that the worldwide demand for mining equipment has actually declined. Consequently, P&H has been compelled to transform itself from a manufacturing company to a "life-cycle management" company-with a growing emphasis on service.

At the same time that P&H has been undergoing this difficult transformation, its parent company (Joy Global, Inc.) has been emerging from bankruptcy. According to P&H's Executive VP for Human Resources, Dennis Winkleman, investing in employees is an essential element of successfully addressing these challenges and positioning the organization for future growth. Thus, a key question facing the organization is how to best invest in employees within a necessarily limited learning budget? Where should they spend their dollars, and what initiatives will have the biggest impact on safety (a key concern) and financial performance?

In order to help answer those questions, they selected McBassi. Winkleman states, "One of the things that most intrigued us about McBassi is their unique business model: their expertise is in linking human capital measurement to business outcomes and using their measurements to generate fact-based recommendations." In October 2003, they implemented the HCC Scorecard (now McBassi People Index®) with an expectation of finding the answers they were seeking.

Findings

Two key findings emerged from the HCC implementation. First, the relative strengths and weaknesses of the HC Foundation Factors were very similar across business units. This provided strong evidence that improving the development and management of P&H employees will require a more centralized approach than has been taken to date, since it is clear that solutions to these issues have not and will not emerge from within the business units. Second, by statistically examining specific strengths and weaknesses across business units and linking them to two key business outcomes-safety and financial performance-four key recommendations emerged as the most critical steps that P&H must take to improve these outcomes. These insights provided information that enabled P&H to prioritize its actions in deciding how and where to best spend its development resources.

The Results

Three developments immediately followed: (1) the training function was reorganized so that it is now more centralized; (2) significant additional resources are being devoted to the newly organized Division of Learning and Performance; and (3) that division has a clear list of priorities for the initiatives that it should undertake to have the most immediate and powerful positive impact on safety and financial performance. Subsequently, the development and management of people has become a truly integral component of P&H's strategic focus, and not coincidentally, the organization's business results have improved very significantly.

Summing up the HCC Scorecard implementation, Steve Baue, P&H Director of Knowledge and Development, observed, "We received so much more than we had expected from our work with McBassi. Their ability to link key human capital metrics to safety, financials, and employee engagement/retention definitely got the attention of our senior managers. These results, coupled with the insightful recommendations from the McBassi staff, have proven essential in our strategy to drive business outcomes through more effective development and management of our people."

Clients

P&H Mining Equipment

The Need

Findings

The Results

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