Helping the Royal Mail simplify external training reporting at scale

The Situation

Founded in 1516, Royal Mail is a British multinational postal service and courier company. With more than 160,000 employees they deliver 29 million parcels each year to homes and businesses across the UK and Internationally. 

Royal Mail has a long history of employing apprentices, graduates, and other early career employees with the number of apprentices growing considerably in recent years.  

There are 40+ programmes and as a result there are between 30 and 50 external training providers being used each year for delivery.

Head of Royal Mail Apprenticeships, Tracy Fairhurst, manages mass apprentices numbers with a small team and an array of complex spreadsheets.

Internal progress reporting must regularly be carried out to a range of business leads, departments, and regions. 

Conveya worked with Royal Mail to help support their growing apprentice programme, with programmes ranging from administration, sales, engineering and IT.

The Challenge 

To add to the administrative headache of managing such large numbers of learners, Tracy and her team receive between 30 and 50 different varieties of training provider progress reports every month. Analysing the data coming in was a constant battle. Each provider had their own unique way of reporting, including their own terminology, individual spreadsheet passwords or dashboard with logins.

The challenge for Tracy and her team was to find a way to quickly identify who needs help, what type of help they need and how can that be done without losing their minds in 50 varieties of reports every month.

How we helped

Luckily, our Report app was built to solve this exact problem.

First, we created reporting dashboards that included Royal Mail branding and could display data by any variable set by Tracy and her team. These variables included training provider, location, business division, age group and programme.

We then activated our unique training provider portal for external training providers to report into using red, amber or green statuses against each apprentice to standardise reporting across providers and programmes.

Conveya onboarded all providers with webinars and provided user-guides on how to use the tool. We engaged via introductions from Royal Mail and ensured that the provider account managers or assessors understood the requirements of our mutual client.

In Tracy's words, "Conveya (formerly Scopesuite) has really eased the administrative burden on my team allowing them to function more effectively on supporting our apprentices and stakeholders...I highly recommend this product to anyone in early careers with large or complex populations to manage - it will ease the burden from day 1."

Return on Investment

The time that used to be spent chasing and trying to analyse endless varieties of reports every month can now be better spent on programme improvement, internal reporting, and supplier relationship management.

Dashboards now clearly identify who needs support and what type of support is needed. And since Royal Mail can easily see who needs support, they can provide that support to apprentices faster than ever before. 

The apprentice management team does not need to spend time collating reports and sharing them with the business. Instead, dashboards are broken down into the relevant business units for instant reporting and visibility over organisational KPI’s.

Overall performance, employee satisfaction and retention levels can benefit as a result.

Additionally, we have provided regional dashboard views to business leads who manage apprentices at a local level. This further eases the reporting burden on the central team and allow for support actions to be taken when they are needed most.

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Product Used by Royal Mail

Conveya