The Enterprise Study Network, Customer Control

Executive overview

To re-cap these are the 6 ESN bullets:

• Training supply chain management (part 1)
• Control
• Plug-n-Play
• Marketplace
• Reporting
• Internal training administration

Control

When you are managing a team of people who buy training using conventional tools and technologies you have little control over where they buy from and at what price.

When you use ESN you bring control to the situation. You can decide which training partners are in your catalogue. You can even decide which individual courses are listed.

Now obviously you can’t force all training purchases to be managed through ESN unless you change your business processes (for example not authorising the training unless the request is entered in ESN). However ESN makes life so much easier than using paper based catalogues that people will naturally use it for their research anyway.

Once you have people visiting ESN to find their training you can advertise your internal (sometimes called group or onsite courses) in amongst the commercial offerings. If you’ve gone to the trouble of arranging a course just for your employees it makes sense to get as many people on it as you can. The normal problem is that they don’t know the courses are there – by combining those dates with the commercial dates you increase your fill rate.

You also have the option to remove a training provider or some of their courses from your catalogue. This gives you greater control over where your business is directed, which in turn should give you greater buying power and hopefully better quality of service.

The Enterprise Study Network, Training supply chain management

Executive overview

The target audience for the Enterprise Study Network (ESN) are training buyers. Companies large and small that buy training from external suppliers.

To start off let's try and define the ESN in 6 bullets:

• Training supply chain management
• Control
• Plug-n-Play
• Marketplace
• Reporting
• Internal training administration

If you are still interested, read on and I will define each feature.

Training supply chain management

Let's suppose that you buy training from external suppliers. You do this using a training administration team. Training requests from the company come in one door and your team uses the phones, a stack of catalogues and the Internet to source training for those requests. What would ESN do for you?

ESN combines the training catalogues, both dates and courses, from your preferred suppliers into one personalised database for you to search. We can keep this database accurate because we have gone to the trouble of working directly with the training providers. They provide us with data feeds directly from their own databases.

When we configure your account, we ensure that your discount structures with your preferred suppliers are in the database - the prices you see are the prices you pay. All the calculations are done for you.

All you have to do then is raise an order - in ESN - and the order is routed to the training provider.

Now you could just use ESN within your administration team to make your search, selection and ordering more efficient. However you can also have an employee self service workflow installed which allows your employees to search and request training themselves. All you need to do then is seek authorisation, enter the purchase order number and click confirm.

We can even feed attendance information back into your LMS. Attendance information direct from the training provider.

That's enough for now...I'll blog on the other items later...

Any questions?