Transform Your Training Program from Cost Center to a Business Value Driver

Investing in a learning management system (LMS) for your extended enterprise is a major decision with a sizable ongoing investment. Not only does the LMS have its own costs, there’s also the money, time, and effort to create and deploy the content. While the budget for these items is available at the rollout of your training program, continuous spending may not be a top priority if your organization doesn’t see business value. 

Your training program needs to prove its business value to executives. That means your LMS and your training program need to do more than just deliver training that checks the boxes. You need training that can be measured against specific metrics to prove its impact on the health and performance of your extended enterprise.

It can be done. The question is how.

Moving Your Training Beyond Just a Cost Center

Unfortunately, training isn’t cheap and is commonly viewed as a cost center with no value. What happens to cost centers that aren’t proving their value in today’s economy? These programs are at risk of being reduced even further, thus exacerbating the problem of an ineffective training program. 

Without the appropriate backing and resources, you can’t improve your program or get it off the ground in a way that can provide the type of business value that your executives are looking for.

However, a well-organized training program has great potential to provide value to the business if it is leveraged appropriately. The problem is that many training managers don’t know the next best step to take to level up their training program in a way that provides an overarching value to the organization outside of check-box training. 

If you can find a way to prove the value of your LMS, you become more than just a training manager. You’ve earned a spot at the table with the executives who are making the decisions.

Bringing the Measurables of the Organization into the LMS

In any extended enterprise, there are multiple metrics that are measured on a daily basis. Such metrics as units sold, repair orders, net promoter scores, and warranty claims gauge the health of any given partner in an extended enterprise. If these are the metrics that executives are looking at to see which partners are performing well and which partners aren’t, then how do we integrate these metrics into our training program?

It may sound like a stretch, but your training does have the ability to impact key performance metrics in your extended enterprise. By tracking which network members have received which training and comparing high and low performers and the training they have completed, you can get a good feel for which elements of your training program are progressing the business forward. 

Once you have a good glimpse of the types of training that are providing value in your training program, you can tailor the program and fine-tune the other elements to ensure that all components of your training are driving the business forward. Congratulations! You’ve just turned your training program from a cost center into a profit center. 

Additionally, it helps to use it as a way to incentivize participation. If you have a top performer who has completed all assigned trainings, you can go to your low performers with the correlation of training and performance to encourage their participation.  

Using Training to Solve Your Problems

Once you’ve integrated your key performance indicators (KPIs) into your training program and you have drawn a clear parallel between training and performance, you will be looked to as a resource to solve the problems that arise in the organization. 

You will have input on how to deploy new product rollouts, how these rollouts will impact training, and how to measure it in the LMS to ensure that the rollout is widely accepted and implemented among your partner networks. 

When pivotal changes are coming down the pipeline at your organization, your voice will carry weight as you determine the best ways to implement these changes with the capabilities of the training program for maximum adoption and impact. 

Additionally, if the organization is facing a specific problem across the board, it can now come to you for a solution. Your training program just became the best way to fix any given problem in your organization, and that is a valuable position to be in. 

Leaning on LatitudeLearning for Business Impact

LatitudeLearning understands that the investment you make in your training program needs to not only prove it’s value and begin to generate some sort of ROI, but we believe in taking your organization from cost center to profit center and maximizing the business value of the LMS that houses your training program. 

Our LMS is built with the extended enterprise in mind. We understand the nuances of the industry and the functionality your LMS needs to support them. Other LMS providers aren’t in tune with the specific needs of extended enterprises. And while they may boast comprehensive features that will look great at the beginning, you’ll end up married to a system that doesn’t really meet your needs in a way that pushes your business forward. 

Working with the wrong LMS provider can be even more expensive, as you’ll be looking for additional ways to support your needs with other softwares or reporting capabilities. These can be inefficient and cost you more in labor hours. 

At LatitudeLearning, we are passionate about working with your organization to prove the value of your training program while providing the business impact you’re looking for. If you’re ready to see what we have in store for you, Take the Latitude LMS for a test drive with our free trial experience!