Kelvin TOP-SET passed a milestone in November 2016 when one of our Senior Tutors taught two 3-Day Senior Investigator Courses for the construction company, Bouygues.
The company, with over 120,000 employees in over 100 countries, and with a turnover in excess of €32 billion, is based in Paris. The milestone was the fact that the course was conducted almost entirely in French! To do this we needed to translate all our course materials along with the PowerPoint slides, and we needed a Tutor who spoke French of course!
The Tutor was Dave Thomson, who has lived and worked for seven years in the French-speaking area of Switzerland. The company he worked for there, Syngenta, conducted almost all of their business in French. So Dave is a very proficient French speaker, albeit in Swiss French, and we are very lucky to have his expertise.
The company headquarters have been built in a beautiful setting near Versailles, and the buildings are quite outstanding and unique. Some have described them as a combination of the Taj Mahal and modern version of the Palace of Versailles. That might sound an exaggeration, but is actually not far from the truth. The true dimensions cannot be truly appreciated without viewing the buildings in person, in 3-D. On arrival, what was particularly remarkable was that there wasn’t a vehicle to be seen, not a car in sight. Why? The entire car parking area is underground and can accommodate up to 2,000 cars.
Bouygues is adopting the Kelvin TOP-SET System of investigation throughout the company, and as such, the policy is to train suitable personnel from their facilities in every corner of the globe. Next year, there are to be more 3-Day Senior Investigator Courses arranged in both Paris and Hong Kong. The principle feature of this activity is of course to ‘Train the Trainers’. Kelvin TOP-SET offers a 4-Day programme during which company employees can become certificated to teach the Kelvin TOP-SET Process within their own company as often as they like and to as many as they wish. For a simple annual licence fee, this agreement between Kelvin TOP-SET and the company can then be maintained indefinitely. This is an economic way to spread the message throughout any company, and enables Kelvin TOP-SET to reach a very large audience throughout the world; something we are very eager to do!
Once inside the building, one is again overwhelmed by the scale, design and construction, which is really quite superb. Were there any snags? Well yes, just one: the entire building is very environmentally friendly. There is geo-thermal heating along with hundreds of solar panels, generating so much electricity that Bouygues can export surplus power to the grid. The downside is that everything is under the central control. Consequently, switching on and off lights, opening windows and controlling the temperature of the teaching room was just not available to us lesser mortals!