Dear Christina,
I had given the reply to a similar subject earlier on some other forum. Let me repeat it now.
Please measure the performance of various departments on quality, quantity, delivery, consistency, customer satisfaction etc. After measurement, find out what are the operational losses. Convert these losses into revenue losses. This makes a case for staff training.
You could have mentioned whether you are from the manufacturing or the service industry. Anyway following are a few examples to get the buy-in from top management:
a) Increase in inventory turnover ratio
b) What is the scrap ratio? By what per cent you can decrease it?
c) What is your overall equipment effectiveness (OEE)? By what per cent you can improve it?
d) How many employees are employed per machine or what volume of work is done per employee? What is the benchmark in your industry? What steps you can do to increase it?
Please remember mere training your staff on hard skills or functional skills will not help. Soft skills also should go hand in hand. To make the soft skills training effective, you can conduct organisation-wise surveys on the culture of communication, interpersonal environment etc. These surveys will give you the direction for your training efforts.
All the best!
Dinesh Divekar
+91-9900155394