Enterprise Training is a Big Deal

Enterprise Training is a Big Deal
I just got off the phone with a guy who has the daunting task of training every one of his new hires a minimum of 400 hours before they can be fully certified and ready to represent the company. That represents a full 20% of the first year’s burdened cost for that person and the person will not be fully ready to make money for the company until that is completed. This is a strategic part of the business that begs to be managed just like the business depends on this for its continued success and well being. This is the internal part of enterprise training, and it should deliver maximum value for money and time spent.

Training as a profit center is a very real possibility and something that a company should expect when they plan their training offering. To keep track of a full-blown customer training program is a daunting task, I should know, I ran the training for three years at DATAP Systems now called Critical Control (www.criticalcontrol.com) and four years at Valmet, now called Telvent (www.telvent.com). That was over 15 years ago and we didn’t have Web 2.0 or any of these wonderful collaborative tools and applications to get us all working together as one. I used to manage the training departments with countless spreadsheets, Word documents, and towards the end of my training career we were posting static webpages with schedules, and other documents. Now we can capture cost data, revenue data, evaluations, student information, important dates, and provide online reference libraries and a raft of other tools and features that can help manage the entire department and to input the data once. If your business is at a point where you require a system to manage your internal training and to manage the training of your clients and partners we have a feature that we can add to the Toolbox which adds value. Our developers are working on the Training Management Tool for the MyCompany Toolbox right now, please look for this added to the Toolbox within the next two weeks. Same price, same integrated Tools all using the same Enterprise database.

So as we always think, ERP systems need to include training management in their bag of tricks. This whole business begs for ERP. You can now track evaluations to the nth degree by creating KPI reports to determine areas of strength, weakness, customer satisfaction, and to generally keep you in the loop with this important piece of the enterprise.

The properly setup ERP system will also manage the sale and support of your training products just as if they were any other product. The system will follow the product from cradle to grave and keep all the relevant notes, diaries, evaluations, and training materials in one virtual spot, available for future analysis and reference.

The ERP system also manages customer training accounts. You can schedule the training and track the training already delivered and the results (evaluations) of each course. It doesn’t take long to realize that you won’t missed renewals, commitments, and customer needs if you have a single database that tracks everything.

Training records are a touchy subject. It is touchy because there is a new found cry for privacy and training records are extremely private. So if you are going to keep track of training records you better have a bullet proof system that has restricted access. Believe me, we won’t be missing that when the Training Management Tool rolls out. Just think of the value of online records to any company that invests in their people like the company I mentioned in the first paragraph. That company has 12000 employees, if you figure in even 3% turnover and do the math and you will see that the company has an internal training budget that is likely over $8 million per year. So if the company is investing that kind of money into their workforce they should manage it as much as they can to get as much value out of the program as possible. With enough records and a large enough sample you can start to do KPI analysis of the company from a strategic standpoint. The possibilities are boundless.

One more idea, about enterprise training. It is a good idea to keep the license renewal, certification updates, and all the other critical dates in the training records. It is kind of like product warranty management where there is a shelf life to some credentials and they need to be reapplied periodically. The ERP system should provide those critical reminders by emailing the person’s supervisors and the person to keep this all up to date.