Christina Yue, Customer Learning Manager |

Founded in 1919, Cummins Inc. is a leader in diesel and alternative fuel engines and electrical generator sets. Throughout 100 years of service, the leaders at Cummins have focused not only on excellence in the oil industry, but also on developing communities through the environment, education, social justice, and equality of opportunity. Knowing how much this organization values personal and professional development,  key HR leaders were invited to present their company’s competency management program to attendees at Oracle HCM World.

In the presentation, Andrew Swingler and Mike Whitesell described what Cummins refers to as “Working Right.”

“Our people are empowered to grow their career in the right direction with meaningful work, coaching, development opportunities, and making their impact on the world.”

This empowerment is supported by the competency management process. Since 2017, HR leaders have been developing and piloting a new system across the organization.

Approach to Competency Management Process

Cummins’ approach to their new process includes two steps:

• Establish functional excellence.
• Create a competency matrix that encourages career growth, creates development plans, and maps learning and development opportunities.

In creating the competency matrix, the Cummins team worked with subject matter experts to build an extensive competency library. Proficiencies were then mapped through job model profiles across the company, keeping in mind these competencies were purely for development, not performance.

Once the competency matrix was built, the team set up the competency assessment, which contained three steps:

1. Employee Self-assessment
2. Manager Validation
3. Calibration Conversation

In the first step, employees rate all competencies tied to their job profile. Each profile includes 10-12 competencies and employees can add extra competencies as needed. In the second step, managers consider employee ratings, validate ratings from their own perspective, and prepare for a conversation with their employee. Lastly, the calibration conversation takes place outside of the system. The first two steps are designed to enhance the conversation. Ideally, the system pieces remain quick and transparent and drive meaningful conversations.

System Considerations for the Build in Oracle HCM

In building the system in Oracle HCM, the team considered the following priorities:

• Simplify the process.
  • Design process flow with only two steps
• Focus on user experience
  • Use the Performance Document to collect competency information
  • Create the Performance Document ahead of time
  • Allow users to add additional competencies to the assessment
• Limit Need for Admin Support
  • Allow managers to complete specific document tasks (e.g. Transfer Performance Document)
• Next Steps After Process
  • Provide support materials directly on assessment pages

These considerations drastically improved overall processes. By prototyping throughout the build, the team identified cumbersome requirements and simplified as much as possible. In addition to simplification, they increased access for end users, saving time on the support team’s end and removing unnecessary disruptions on the manager’s end. For example, before updating the system, 70 percent of support tickets were regarding transferring performance documents to a new manager. With this change alone, workload drastically decreased and efficiencies increased.

Once they formed a successful prototype, the team decided to pilot the entire program with 950 employees in their HR department. The positive results shown below encouraged them to move forward with initiation across the organization.

Competency Pilot Results

• 950+ HR Employees participated
• 14,000 competencies rated through the assessment document
• 94 percent of participants completed the assessment online before it was closed
• 91 percent understood the value of the competency assessment they completed

Looking ahead, these results in action will inform merit and performance launches, identify strategic development focus for HR function, define the basis for development plans and opportunities, and highlight potential career moves for employees through a find best fit functionality.

With the first pilot completed in 2017, the team planned to implement pilot two with six additional functions in 2018, add remaining functions in 2019, and maintain and integrate during 2020 and beyond. All in all, they are very optimistic about the overall improvements and potential for better working relationships and development across the entire organization.

Hear more about Cummins’ Competency Management Process here.

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