Web-based training tool
The British Sandwich Association (BSA) is the trade body for the £5 billion UK sandwich industry. It wanted a low-cost and accessible way of providing training to production staff in sandwich manufacturing.
"We were concerned that there needed to be better training throughout the industry, and particularly where staff were brought in from agencies," says Jim Winship, Director of BSA.
Online training and testing
PointBeyond, in partnership with graphic design company Heath Associates, designed and built an easy-to-use online training and testing tool. The site was built to detailed specification, using a combination of ASP.NET and SQL Server to provide dynamic content, commerce capability and management reporting.
When an organisation signs up to the training scheme it can purchase as many individual courses as it needs; employees are given automatically generated access codes that they can use to log in to the training. Each sandwich company manages its own set of courses and can monitor the progress of its employees using built-in reporting tools.
Registrants have up to 3 attempts to pass the course. Because questions are drawn from a pool in a randomised sequence, people are unable to cheat by memorising or recording questions.
Management reporting
Built-in reporting provides information both to the sandwich companies and to the BSA. For the BSA, this means it can track how well different companies perform in the tests and get a feel for levels of improvement in knowledge and standards. It can get data on which organisations have signed up, who bought what and when courses have been used.
Encouraging response
PointBeyond designed the web site to make it easy for the BSA to update it if there any regulatory changes in the industry. The next step is to build different language versions to cater for the relatively high numbers of immigrant workers in the industry.
The site is in its early stages but Jim Winship is encouraged by the response so far. He says: "The web training tool is being well received in the industry. Our main objective is food safety and we want to get training in to as many people as possible at the lowest possible cost."
