University and HRD co-designing of smart factory people transformation for agri-food industry

Industries in Thailand are transforming themselves to become digital organizations to increase their competitiveness. The transformation leads to the huge changes of the whole systems including technology, process and people. HRD unit therefore plays an important role to provide professional development programs to ensure that the staff acquire the new sets of competencies to serve the new technology changes. KMUTT as the leading technology university in Thailand has been closely working with MIRACLE (pseudonym), Thailand’s leading Agri-Food company in the project aiming to transform its traditional factory to become digital and smart ones according to the company’s new missions. 33 factory managers were put into the program specifically designed by university researchers and company’s HRD experts. Four working steps has been introduced namely discover, design, find gap and upskill to pursue the mission. Data on target groups’ competency gaps before and after the treatment have been collected and analyzed to identify success on the competency development programs. The results show that blended learning method as well as problem-based projects on digital transformation are the successful approaches which confirm the positive impact of 70:20:10 Model of learning and development.