IP Challenge—From Employee Badge to LMS and No Paper in Sight

By Paul Harris

Problem: Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Corporation delivered more than one million hours of classroom training in 2003, a 51 percent increase over the previous two years, to large and small audiences at multiple sites. Lockheed Martin instructors historically used paper rosters to collect attendance and to serve as reference for manual entry of training completions into Lockheed Martin Aeronautics’s learning management system (LMS). Roster entry turn-around varied from days to weeks, creating an adverse impact on periodic audits, particularly as the training enables employees to obtain certifications for their jobs. How could Lockheed Martin avoid this enormous expenditure of time and manpower and improve roster processing turn-around?

Solution: Taking advantage of each employee’s identification badge, training provider Raytheon Professional Services LLC integrated custom software with off-the-shelf hardware enabling student badges to be scanned at the classroom. The collected data is uploaded to Lockheed Martin Aeronautics’s LMS on a daily basis thus providing timely and accurate employee training records. 

When defense and aerospace giant Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Corporation decided several years ago to outsource training design, delivery, and administration functions, it turned to a company that was equally familiar with its business--aerospace heavyweight and frequent competitor and partner Raytheon Company. So important was military and government training to Raytheon’s business that in the early 1990s it created Raytheon Professional Services LLC (RPS), a separate unit to focus on the rapidly expanding commercial training field. Today, the division’s corporate clients include General Motors, Nokia, Hewlett Packard, Ford, and others.

RPS project manager Chet Williams, who oversees the Lockheed Martin partnership, noted early on that Lockheed’s manual collection of classroom attendance via paper-based rosters presented many challenges. Rosters were manually entered by instructors into Lockheed’s LMS so students could get credit for the class, a laborious process. The large number of rosters presented tracking and storage issues. Paper-based rosters were usually hand-written and not always clear, thus subject to error upon entry. In total, thousands of hours of instructor time were being spent each year processing rosters.

Williams figured there had to be a better way. “We had used an antiquated bar code scanner and laptop to collect attendance at large auditorium events, with the data being stored into an Excel spreadsheet. That data was being processed manually into the LMS as required. Although the equipment had a history of inaccurate data collection, it did seem like the idea of using badges for classrooms had potential.”

Williams, a former software engineer, said it occurred to them that Lockheed Martin Aeronautic employee badges were consistent across all sites, with each having a magnetic strip and bar code. They asked, “What if you married an old idea with newer technology? Suppose you took a Palm based hand-held bar code scanner and used it to scan badges in the classroom and linked that scanner with a PC based software application that allowed a user to create events that attendance could be collected against. That same application could format the attendance data and upload it the to Lockheed’s LMS on a regular basis.” Lockheed Martin Aeronautics’s new Thinq LMS, implemented in 2003, provided the functionality to allow for the formatting and uploading. 

So they began the systems engineering process with the end product being a software and hardware design document. It called for an off-the-shelf integrated optical scanner, a Palm-based device manufactured by Symbol Technologies, and a custom software application nicknamed the Event Editor.

Williams oversaw the development of Event Editor, software that would enable users to create an “event” or import a scheduled event roster from the LMS for which attendance could be collected. With a single push of a button, each event could be down-loaded to the handheld device. A custom Palm-based application handled the user interface and collection of attendance data. Completed event attendance is uploaded back to the PC. At the Event Editor, the user is able to view and/or edit the event attendance, save to disk, or print a hardcopy. Once satisfied, the user exports the event attendance to the LMS through a single command.

The system has been a resounding success, enabling Lockheed Martin and its happy instructors to dispense with manual processing of paper rosters. Data collected over the first two months of the system roll-out shows dramatic improvement. The number of man hours required to process rosters has decreased several thousand percent. The error rate has dropped to near zero, while estimated savings will exceed US$300,000. Savings will increase since Lockheed Martin Aeronautics is continuing to roll it out division-wide. 

The episode underscores another important fact, says Ray Matteson, director of Managed Learning Services at RPS. “When you take responsibility for learning solutions in a large outsourcing partnership, you need to understand the existing infrastructure within that organization. Customers want answers on how to work with an existing budget and infrastructure.”