This blog is part five of a five-part Training Budget Defense blog series. This article focuses on how Administrate’s suite of automation tools can create immediate cost savings for your Training team.
For specific, data-driven recommendations tailored to your team’s needs, we encourage you to take our Scalability Index Assessment. It’ll give you a deeper view of how your team compares to a baseline of hundreds of other Training teams.
The State of Automation in L&D
Automation has been on the mind of every professional for years now. In the last few years, the development and adoption of automation tools has accelerated faster than ever before – in almost every industry. But just because a task has been automated, doesn’t mean it’s been automated well. Increasing the adoption of automation tools in L&D is an important goal. But making sure that the industry is adopting the right tools is just as important.
There are enough point-solution automation tools out there to awkwardly bolt something together and cover the basics. But if you have a dozen different tools automating different parts of your operations, coordinating those tools quickly becomes a time-consuming task. And wasn’t the point of automation to save time?
Worse, many off-the-shelf automation solutions don’t provide much, if any, visibility on the data that they’re using. If they do, it’s often in a pre-made, non-customizable report. Key data that could be informing your decision-making is lost, not because it wasn’t collected, but because these tools aren’t capable of reporting it.
What’s needed are automation tools that are flexible, connective, and well-integrated with the rest of the training function. They should provide seamless functionality, without needing constant management and maintenance. And they should be combined into a single platform, so that the whole training function can be managed from a single UI. That’s what Administrate has set out to build.
How Does a Lack of Automation Undermine the Training Budget?
Part of why Administrate has focused on developing automation tools for Training teams is that handling training management manually is expensive. In particular, using your employees’ time to complete repetitive management tasks is a poor use of resources in two ways:
- Automation delivers efficiency for tasks humans struggle with. A human just can’t iterate through thousands of possible solutions to find the best one. Some tasks, like scheduling, are best optimized with extensive iteration and a lot of math. A computer is much more likely to deliver the best solution and reduce inefficiency. It’s also much less likely that a computer will make a costly error like double-booking a key resource.
- The opportunity cost of using skilled employees to complete repetitive tasks is immense. You’ve worked hard to secure and retain skilled talent in a competitive labor market. That human capital is a valuable asset, and you need to deploy it effectively to recoup its cost. That means letting L&D professionals harness training data to develop a better learner experience. They can’t deliver that kind of value while working on mail merge lists.
Training teams need automation tools so that they can refocus their efforts on the things that really matter. The monthly report needs to be pulled. But that report is not going to help scale up your training operations. It isn’t going to move the needle on core business objectives. Those factors build influence for the Training team, and which you can point to to justify budget and spend.
So let a computer run that report for you. Refocus your employees on the strategic planning and data analysis that will take your team’s influence to the next level.
What Automation Features Can Admininstrate Provide?
Automation is crucial for using your most valuable asset – your employees – as effectively as possible. Administrate is committed to developing powerful automation functionality, tailored for the L&D field. While we have automation features throughout our training management system, there are three major features that we feel provide the most value. Let’s go through the budget case for each of them
- Automated Email and SMS. Administrate has a deeply-integrated system of communications triggers that can be connected to almost any event within the software. With a little configuration, you can create automatic communications templates tied to whatever conditions you need. Sending out confirmation emails, course materials, schedules, etc., can all be completely automated. That frees up employees from spending hours carefully coordinating basic communications.
- Automated Reporting. Administrate’s comprehensive, no-code reporting engine can be easily configured to pull and analyze data from the entire training function. Most learning tech has only limited, pregenerated reporting, meaning that any custom reports often require manually pulling and analyzing raw data. Administrate’s reporting engine can be configured to create custom reports automatically. It can also be linked to the automated communications systems, so that these reports are sent directly to stakeholders.
- Training Scheduling Software. Scheduler is a tool for automatically managing resources, instructors, and events. It can take data on the events you want to hold and the requirements for those events, and use it to generate schedules that fit your team’s needs. No more spending days or weeks manually shuffling courses around to fit – and no more double-booked classrooms or equipment. Scheduler boosts efficiency all around, reducing waste and saving time. That translates directly to reduced overhead costs.
Check out the video below to see a demonstration of Scheduler in action.
Each of these features saves your employees’ time and allows them to refocus on improving your ROI. We’ve seen how these features and efficiencies translate into real savings. Royal Caribbean Group, for example, saw a 10% total savings on their annual training budget by implementing automation with Administrate. You can learn more about Royal Caribbean’s automation success story here.
Administrate is committed to making sure that Training teams have the tools they need to keep up with the business world. Until now, learning tech has been drifting further and further behind. For Training teams to stay influential and impactful within their organizations, they need to deploy their resources as effectively as possible. Automation can be an important step to making the training budget go further. For some more information on how your team could be making the most of your budget, consider taking our Scalability Index Assessment.
If you found this blog useful, take a look at the other entries in our Budget Defense blog series.
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