Making Sure We Heard You

Established in 1958, Hahn Automotive has built a successful business selling aftermarket vehicle parts to local automotive repair shops.  With a strong business presence in the Eastern and Central United States, Hahn provides parts from over 90 retail shops to their customers by leveraging their impressive network of over 40 warehouses.

In light of their commitment to nurture talent, Hahn Automotive approached its HR and Marketing teams, tasking them to develop a codified training and ramp plan for team members. Their mission is to impact the local retail location team, addressing issues such as turnover, new hire training, business culture, and channel partner relationships. Employees at these locations could be a site manager, a counter representative, part drivers, and potentially a salesperson.

While turnover has been statistically low among managers and leadership in general, there is a business need for a robust, interactive remote training program, with a primary audience of Hahn Automotive’s front line employees. These new training initiatives will contain recorded video, some assessments for comprehension, and provide a solid baseline for employees to fulfill and succeed in their role, enabling Hahn Automotive to grow and develop talent.

We welcome this opportunity to partner with Hahn Automotive, and to consistently drive value to the Hahn Automotive team.

Assessing Challenges

Several obstacles have been identified in Hahn’s existing training procedures.

• Consistency and Trackability – Currently, new hire training is done via job shadowing and OJT by the site manager at the retail location. Hahn Automotive also has very few quantifiable insights on team members in the current ramp process.
• Expense – Hiring is expensive. For each non-essential day that the store has employees in training, there is an increased opportunity cost burden on the others in the location, as trainees pull them away from their primary job responsibilities.
• Room for growth – Hahn Automotive needs solutions that will not only address immediate needs, but leverage a partnership and a suite of tools that can evolve with the company in the years ahead.

Creating Opportunities

The proposed partnership will address the challenges above with these solutions:

• Consistency and Trackability – A new program must be developed to provide baseline standards and consistent results, regardless of the store location or manager tenure. By systemizing new hire onboarding, Hahn Automotive will be able to hold the team to particular standards before they handle live customer interactions. Built-in checkpoints throughout the video and quiz modules will ensure learning is happening at the right time for eventual job performance.
• Costs – There are significant business opportunity cost advantages to having new team members ramp up in a timely yet flexible manner. The SJMG solution will bring a modular system of recorded video content that new hire employees can take when time permits, from either within the shop or via mobile devices. This “just in time” training still empowers the site manager to have them train at the most convenient time for the individual location.
• Room for Growth – Initial project conversations between SJMG and Hahn Automotive contained great vision for these training content modules. These training modules could include HR videos, hiring and recruiting best practices/ads, onboarding training, computer systems training, and Manager-In-Training content, with limitless potential to expand and evolve. The SJMG and Hahn Automotive teams are well poised to support an evolving partnership, permitting SJMG to execute this vision at scale, over time.