Podcast: Proving the ROI of training: Metrics that matter in maintenance

In this sponsored episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast, Thomas Wilk, chief editor of Plant Services, sits down with Ryan Smith, a Solutions Engineer with TPC, a Certus company, whose areas of training specialty include industrial maintenance topics for electrical, mechanical, and HVAC systems.

Today's great question is: How do you calculate the ROI of training?

This episode is sponsored by:

Below is an excerpt from the podcast: 

PS: What plant KPIs are you aware of that are often tied directly back into training programs?

RS: On its face, training feels like an expenditure only, like a cost center more than a cost savings, where companies are just dedicating dollars into it and not sure whether they're getting the payback.

Thankfully, in the world of training, the benefits do improve so many parts of the business that can be quantified. The first one has to do with reduced downtime. We ask our customers: How many minutes of downtime do you have per day, or per week or per month? And then: Can you tell us how much money it costs your company for each hour of downtime on a given machine in your facility?

They report tens of thousands of dollars minimum per hour of downtime, and that’s typically per machine.

If you think about the confidence of what it takes to:
A. Figure out what's wrong with the machine.
B. Identify the root cause
C. Make the repair and get it back up and running.

That takes a level of skill and knowledge that all speaks back to training. Really, that whole process is all part of what we call troubleshooting skills. It's a big area that we focus on: how to build troubleshooting knowledge and how the confidence in those skills can be detected through reduced machine downtime.

Even increasing uptime a couple percentage points over the course of a year, where there’s millions of dollars at stake, provides an immediate return on your training program (and then some) because of improved confidence in troubleshooting.

PS: Beyond downtime, what would you say some of the other key metrics are that you can tie the value of training back to?

RS: The reduced safety incident rate is the most quantifiable. How many near misses or full-on OSHA recordable incidents are happening in your facility every year? Maybe you had just one in the last year, maybe you had a few. How much are those safety incidents really costing the company, first and foremost?

And there is another cost associated with safety incidents: workers' compensation costs. The company is now liable for clinic visits and rehabilitation costs.. But it all comes back to: was this person properly trained to do the job? And were they trained to do that job in a way that meets the standards of your organization?

But it’s not just about workers' comp, right? There are associated OSHA fines. Anytime you have to record an injury or incident to OSHA, those come with five figures, easily, of OSHA violations and fines that can stack.

Another metric to look at is the DART rate – the Days Away, Restricted, and Transferred from the job. This rate impacts the effectiveness of the workforce and the ability to schedule people in that workforce.

And that all bleeds through to the bottom line of that company, as well, because now we have to add more temporary labor, which is less reliable. Or we have to overschedule people—let’s say those working 12-hour shifts now have to start working 15-hour shifts to cover the people who are away. This means team members may make more mistakes due to fatigue.

PS: Can you give us some insight into these processes: the calculation of ROI values. and then the strategies or importance of reporting them out to various levels of the organization?

RS: Creating a kind of a metabolism, a culture and a process around continuing to track and monitor them around these KPIS is really where a learning management system, or LMS, can come into play

The operations team is tracking downtime, usually on an hourly and daily basis. You can go into your learning management system and see, for example, a 3% improvement in downtime, from 87% uptime to 90% uptime.

Next, go back to the LMS for that same date range and see which trainings were completed at which times. And how folks did on their pre- and post-tests or their simulation assessments—where they're troubleshooting actual relays, VFDs, and electric motors? Is that tying back, over time, to downtime improvement?

An LMS also solves another challenge that pen-and-paper tracking causes. It’s hard to find any trends or ways training tied back operations when you rely on handwritten records. It doesn’t mean anything once it’s in a filing cabinet.

If OSHA knocks at your door, you’ve got to let them in. They’re going to ask you all sorts of questions, and one of the first questions any OSHA inspector asks is: “Where’s your records of training? Which training have you offered, and when did you offer it? And is there proof of completion of that training?”

If it’s all handwritten, you’re starting to look through your cabinet and may be panicking a little bit. But when it’s in an LMS instead of a file cabinet, it’s available immediately through your digital paper trail — utilize the LMS to pull your records in a few clicks. It uses the exact date range and shows you who completed training, when it was completed, and how they scored on knowledge checks.

Plus, information is transferred between the decision makers in your plant much quicker thanks to cloud-based storage. Everyone who’s on that management team or administering training within that plant or the larger organization can see those results, immediately after training is complete.

PS: You mentioned a couple different kinds of training, especially the value of hands-on training. These mobile tools have lent themselves to a rise in simulated learning as well. I was curious to know if there are areas of knowledge delivery that lend themselves to simulated learning?

RS: I would say the world of electrical troubleshooting training lends itself very well to simulated learning, for a couple of reasons.

The first reason is: when you troubleshoot live electrical equipment in the field, it’s great hands-on learning, that’s true. But it’s also very dangerous, and very instantly dangerous if you do something wrong. You can go from everything being fine to being seriously life-threateningly shocked or experiencing an arc flash injury in a matter of a split second. That could send you to the hospital if you’re not properly trained and not following proper procedures.

What if there was a way for folks to have that experience of opening a live electrical panel and making their mistakes without getting hurt or destroying million-dollar equipment? There really is a large appetite for simulated electrical learning, because you can create those issues and practice repairing them without causing serious damage to equipment.

PS: I’ve heard a lot of chatter this year, 2025, about teams wanting to focus on process improvement due to business uncertainty introduced in the marketplace in Q2. What are you hearing from your customers?

RS: We’re getting a lot of requests for things like programmable logic controller (PLC) training, and variable frequency drive training—very electronics-based training.

But then—and I think this speaks to that uncertainty—we’re seeing companies having to cope with the fact that they’re hiring some brand-new, very green technicians into their workforce out of necessity. They need to lean on the promise of someone’s potential more than their experience level in the matter.

When this happens, they need a system or a program in place to get inexperienced team members ramped up quickly. There’s huge value in getting right down to brass tacks and having a structured way of giving those green people a chance to learn into their roles. And when employers provide training programs with simulations, people can have a nice, lucrative career for themselves – all driven by that good training program.

About the Podcast
Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast offers news and information for the people who make, store and move things and those who manage and maintain the facilities where that work gets done. Manufacturers from chemical producers to automakers to machine shops can listen for critical insights into the technologies, economic conditions and best practices that can influence how to best run facilities to reach operational excellence.