The PAC Group has a global workforce spread across six continents which help support clients in various engineering and manufacturing industries. Starting from a small number of automotive companies, they experienced explosive growth, and their manual way of finding and connecting subject matter experts was becoming difficult.
Due to work being project based, they have many temporary contractors with jobs of a few months to several years. Matching all of these workers' different skills in manufacturing, construction and project management, being able to see who was working on which projects, and who had certain skill sets to take on new projects, was a challenge.
The issue around uniting their global workforce and connecting them with new projects was the primary mission the team set out to solve. To answer this, they decided to have a centrally accessible place to store their employees' skill sets and talents so that they could better utilize their workforce, and match them to certain projects suiting their background and skills.
Their internal Beta team began searching for several products at the same time, from Monday, CRMs, and low code apps like Quickbase before finding what they were looking for in Sift.
Silvana Nodj, Business Operations Analyst at The PAC Group, took the lead and worked closely with Sift’s client success team to customize Sift to their organizations needs. This included customizing several fields on Sift’s Profile pages like adding in certain skills spread across 10 different categories related to engineering and project management like 6-sigma, CAD, ISO, 5S, KANBAN and more. These skills were the foundation for creating a profile for every single worker at The PAC Group.
Having a dispersed workforce, the rollout of Sift started in the US office which accounted for 40% of their employees, before expanding across several countries across six continents. Silvana worked closely with local HR representatives in each region to help roll Sift out globally. Including having onboarding guides translated into other languages to help with adoption in countries like Mexico and Thailand.
Sift usage grew across the different PAC groups very quickly. Shortly after rolling out Sift within the US, they introduced Sift to many of the HR representatives in Brazil, Mexico and China at an in-person conference. Silvana was able to sit down and show them how to create their profiles and navigate Sift. Just after that conference, they launched globally in late October. Just two weeks later they are about 70% of the way to enrolling everyone in Sift. It's not easy to pull people from six continents in six different time zones with different cultures and backgrounds and get them to adopt a new tool, but Silvana is doing just that. She thanks Sift’s customer success and product teams for things moving so well.
Silvana explains:
“The Customer Success team has been readily available and very prompt with all of our requests. Our business is quite unique, we appreciate Sift’s ongoing support and guidance throughout deployment.”
After rolling out Sift to its employees The PAC Group is already hearing positive things from team members. Silvana comments:
“One of the most common things heard from team members is how Sift helps put a face behind the name and humanizes their coworkers. So many have been on calls with each other, but they don't know much about each other. And when you get to learn a little bit of their background, education, languages, and interests, you create a relationship with that person.”
People also enjoy being able to find who at PAC matches the right criteria for a specific project . “In PAC, Brazil we could be looking for somebody who has electrical engineering skills, can speak English, Portuguese, and French. Has 3D design skills and can use Sketch. The best place to find that person is through Sift,” says Silvana.
The ability to customize the profiles and add in people or initiatives you support was important as well. Silvana adds, “We also like being able to add a section to Sift and search on it. For example, for teams that people support you can input that to a section on each person's profile and you can actually search with the keyword and discover those people.” This helps make it easier for new team members to get answers to questions.
Silvana uses Sift for creating end of month reports. “I'm a business analyst, and I actually prepare an employee contractor report every month. And one of the main pain points that I've had is keeping track of everybody's project name and project number monthly. Since this is all tracked in Sift, it’s helpful and saves me time.”
As The PAC Group continues to adopt Sift they plan to roll-out new features in stages. They see features like name pronunciation as something that will catch on very well with their diverse workforce. They are also Microsoft Teams users and having the Sift profiles within virtual meetings is something that is very appealing and will roll out in the future.
An 8 Step Guide and workbook to understand how to select the right org chart software for your organization.
Learn how Sift has helped Ulteig create a single place to discover anything about someone in the organization to move work forward, faster.