Kohezion Empowers Non-Profit Agency
with Training Management Solution
INTRODUCTION
CEDARS Youth Services is a non-profit organization whose mission is to help children and youth achieve safety, stability, and enduring family relationships, by providing a variety of essential services. With about 450 employees and foster parents, 90 different training requirements, and approximately 1,200 training courses to parameterize, CEDARS required a highly advanced workflow to adhere to contractual and state/local licensing requirements. CEDARS also needed a solution that would allow them to make changes to their database, such as updating and adding training requirements efficiently, and without the help of a developer.
After considering a dozen low-code database alternatives, CEDARS made the decision to move forward with Kohezion. Kohezion took the time to carefully analyze CEDARS’ complex requirements to produce a flexible design that will allow CEDARS to independently update its training requirements.
Since implementation, staff has significantly reduced human error and the time they spend on tedious manual data entry. This has allowed CEDARS’ training department to free up time for more employee mentoring and one-on-one development. Due to this outstanding success, CEDARS has plans to use Kohezion’s low code development platform across departments for a variety of data management needs.
A training headache ...
Schyler Hearn is the training coordinator and supervisor on CEDARS’ database implementation project. CEDARS currently has about 200 employees, with an additional 200 foster parents that undergo a variety of mandated training. These training requirements change often, and the hours are cumulative. According to Schyler, “There is a lot of complexity when it comes to our database, starting with monitoring and tracking timeframes and completion on an ongoing basis. Some are based on a calendar year, and some are on anniversary dates, such as hire date.”
Individual employees and foster parents are responsible for ensuring their training hours are completed by a specified date. For employees and foster parents, access to progress reporting and up-to-date
information is paramount.
"We have goals for 2022 including the creation of widgets and dashboards to support greater efficiencies and increase employee retention across our organization. Kohezion empowered me and the team to develop this skillset and make all of this possible.”
- Schyler Hearn | Training Coordinator CEDARS Youth Services
THE CHALLENGE
CEDARS was previously using a database specifically built by their internal IT department. The developer who built this legacy system is no longer part of the organization, which made it very difficult to make necessary changes to the database in order to accommodate growth. Aside from the inability to make changes to the programming language, the legacy system would often go offline, and there became a risk of losing all data that wasn’t backed up. This loss of data would be catastrophic. Data security was becoming an increasing concern.
CEDARS was facing an efficiency challenge as the legacy database still required calculations and reporting to be done manually. CEDARS needed a system that supported them in providing quality and compliance while freeing up time from cumbersome tasks.
"The Kohezion developers offered us grace and understanding due to our complexities of the system ...”
- Schyler Hearn | Training Coordinator CEDARS Youth Services
THE CRITERIA
The Kohezion team took the time to identify and investigate the solution criteria identified by Schyler and CEDARS’ training department. “If we were going to make an investment, we wanted all our boxes to be checked and we wanted a system that accommodated all the customization and complexity we required,” said Schyler.
Some of the criteria included the following:
Database that could create individual records
- Ability to link training and accreditation requirements to a person.
- The possibility to enter exceptions for cases where an employee or a foster parent took non-standard training that met a requirement.
- Each employee or foster parent could be assigned one or more training requirements.
Calculate training hours completed in different categories
- Each timeframe or fixed date period had to be configurable per training requirement.
- Each training requirement had to be configurable so that it could be met by taking different sets of training courses.
- Each training course had to be categorized into one or more training categories to calculate training requirements based on the amount of time.
Visual cues to support automation reporting
- Each day a complete training compliance report had to be produced for each employee and foster parent. The report indicates their compliance status (Compliant, Incomplete, or Past Due) for each training requirement. The report also contains their full training history and lists each training course they took and when.
- Custom colors would indicate past due training in orange, incomplete training in purple, and green to indicate compliance.
SOLUTION
After considering a dozen alternatives, Schyler and the CEDARS team booked a demo with Kohezion in May 2020. By early 2021, the data migration to Kohezion’s online database began. Due to the constant change in needs, such as all the training courses being provided online as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, this was a highly iterative process for both CEDARS and Kohezion.
According to Schyler, "The Kohezion developers offered us grace and understanding due to our complexities of the system, created a manual as an ongoing resource for the Training Department for reference purposes, and truly went out of their way to be accommodating. We felt very supported throughout the entire process."
"Kohezion is going to grow with the needs we have 5-10 years from now. And through the support, training, and collaboration with Kohezion in building this database, we have the necessary skills to meet the changing needs of our agency. ”
- Schyler Hearn | Training Coordinator CEDARS Youth Services
IMPLEMENTATION
Kohezion empowered the CEDARS team to leverage the flexible, intuitive software to build a system completely customized to their needs. Kohezion also offered 10+ consulting hours for training, and to make the implementation process as simple as possible. Moving forward, CEDARS will have complete autonomy over the addition or modification to their current set of rules, or other data management changes to accommodate organizational growth. This same thinking is consistent with Schyler and her team’s plans for the future.
The system will be used on a daily basis, and therefore Schyler and her team would need to be comfortable navigating it. A training manual was created by Kohezion to aid in guiding the training department and other agency users through the complexity of the database.
“Kohezion is going to grow with the needs we have 5-10 years from now. And through the support, training, and collaboration with Kohezion in building this database, we have the necessary skills to meet the changing needs of our agency,” said Schyler.
RESULTS
Increased Training Completions: upon implementation of Kohezion, there was a 100% correlation between individuals completing training courses immediately, or finishing past due tasks. This can be attributed largely to the automated updates sent out by the system. The system was working exactly like it was supposed to, and far exceeding expectations.
- “When the system went live and started sending automated training reports to employees, we immediately saw an increase in training completions.” - Schyler
- CEDARS has entered approximately 5000 training sessions attended by employees or foster parents.
Automated Reporting: Prior to Kohezion, it would take Schyler 1-3 business days to manually send out monthly training reports. Now, Kohezion produces these daily reports automatically, empowering self-directed training and initiative due to the constant reporting updates.
- “We want to focus on building relationships, offer one-on-one development opportunities, and empower employees and foster parents to understand and self-monitor their records.” - Schyler
Maximized Efficiency: Kohezion minimized stress by automating essential tasks and reducing human error by shifting the focus back to the preservation of the family, community, and long-term support services.
- “We use this system to increase efficiency, maximize our time, meet our complex needs, and shift the Training Department's focus back to creating professional development opportunities." - Schyler
Kohezion is a low-code, Online Database Software that empowers users to build flexible, customizable systems that meet their business goals now and in the future.
At Kohezion, we aim to deliver high-security database solutions in a fraction of the time, for a fraction of the cost.
