Almost every training professional is painfully aware of the ongoing struggle to justify the value of the training organisation to senior management. Training professionals are seeking ideas and real solutions on how to take the non value- added cost out of the business and repurpose those investments into initiatives that create more value. This ongoing battle and debate is nothing new, but in the face of recessionary economic pressures, the pain is more pronounced.  Here are the nine ways to trim Learning & Training operational expenses.

Consolidate and centralise learning technologies.

Invest in delivery platform management technology, authoring systems technologies,  Learning Management System (LMS) optimise, customise or consolidate learning technologies. Every organisation want to Optimise, customise or consolidate learning technologies.

By reducing the number of systems and simplifying infrastructure, there will be fewer system support requirements, less maintenance, fewer patches, fixes and upgrades, and fewer resource requirements. In addition to fewer people and skill sets, this all helps reduce costs. The result should be improved data success and easier reporting. 

Convert ILT to blended or e-Learning.

One of the key strategies organisations are considering is converting instructor led training to blended or e-learning. The obvious gains here are reductions in travel, facility, equipment, and trainer costs. However, organisations shouldn't just look to cut costs by reproducing and converting content from ILT to e-learning.
They should also work to leverage the big benefits that e-learning provides-such as availability, reusability and effectiveness. E-learning can be available 24/7, but organisations don't have to deliver all of their content as classic e-learning modules. Designed properly and broken into small, usable pieces, e-learning can be used for time-of-need training or performance support. organisations should consider looking at small learning modules, even if it means just converting some of the content to reference materials, lists, diagrams, stories, or lessons learned. There's a great deal of value in having certain information available quickly, and in an easily digestible form.

Optimise learning technology support and administration

This refers to the human activity surrounding a learning system namely, the administrative work going on within the training group. Software as a service plays an integral role here. organisations today don't have to buy, implement and manage learning technology, now that a growing number of LMS providers offer their software as a hosted service.

Security is not the issue today that it used to be. Because of this, an organisation learning can be made secure as well. In addition, organisations can consider third-party companies that host and help manage learning systems.

Today, there are organisations with teams of people dedicated to and focused solely on LMS support. These companies are training and managing their people to support various LMS systems. As such, they have experience with learning domains, best practices, proven processes and IT bandwidth-experience that often is lacking in many organisations.

Centralise services, not processes.

Learning systems in organisation is distributed and totally inefficient. That's because there are multiple people in multiple groups completing the same tasks or transactions, but doing it in multiple ways. Various groups within an organisation have differences in their processes and procedures, such as registration requirements or course description details. But often these process differences are driven more by structures or challenges within their skill set or lack of bandwidth. The resulting issues can be very costly, both in the short and long term.

Improve vendor management.

Benefits are obvious if some type of vendor management programme is implemented. Most of them are accomplished by simply reducing the number of vendors that organisations works with, but one of the key takeaways that we discovered was that a vendor management tool was necessary in order to improve how learning professionals interact and work with their vendors. 

Optimise learning operations.

The real keys to improving business processes are audits and documentation.
A process audit helps determine exactly how a process is being done, and how differently each person is doing it. Once the audit is complete, it's important to document the internal process, which makes it easier to communicate the proper steps of each process to all necessary groups and individuals. 

  Reporting-produce press data and more intelligence .

In terms of reporting, cost and activity measurement is valid in some regards. But many learning leaders struggle in this area, feeling they're bringing to the executive table data that has limited strategic value. This includes such statistics as number of hours trained, number of people trained, and the number of training classes held.
In most cases, the challenge that these organisations are facing is in their LMS reporting as it is limited to just LMS data, and the various pieces of data that they need in order to produce more valuable reports or more business intelligence are hidden in the disconnected data sources.

One strategy is to work with the various business groups within the organisation, because most of them can provide some valuable data on their group's performance. The challenge is dealing with the disbursement of this data within disconnected systems. There are three main options: (1) Migrate data into a single system. (2) Build integrations to your various systems.

However, organisations often have their assessment data within some type of assessment tool database (LMS, HRMS, etc.), and various groups might also have performance or evaluation-type systems. The challenge is how to gather all that data and build all those integrations. (3) Build data marts or something similar. This means putting all data into a single database, enabling you to build reports from there instead of tapping into various systems. Again, the key driver here is trying to build more business intelligence and more actionable information or data beyond just simple activity reports. This will make a world of difference when justifying a learning program to executives.

Optimise training resource utilisation.

This is all about optimizing the Utilisation of classrooms, instructors, course materials and equipment.
Based on our research and polling, it seems that a majority of training leaders are hoping to avoid a good portion of this by converting instructor-led training to e-learning. But as we know, there’s a place in every learning program for a certain amount of instructor-led training. Many organisations are perplexed by this issue because it's difficult to obtain the appropriate data. That’s because they don't necessarily have the required measurements on classroom and instructor usage, course materials, equipment, and related statistics.

A key strategy here is to build or install the appropriate technology or data links and processes so that information can be tracked. This data can then be pulled in a more concerted fashion, rendering it more intelligent and capable of being evaluated and acted upon. 

Run your training organisation like a business.

This tip basically summarises the previous eight. It’s critical to identify your training organisation core skills and determine the true value to the company as a whole. If your value is not found in administration services or in technology management, then it might be a good idea to shed that work or find ways to seriously streamline it. In our research, administration is costing a significant portion-approximately 40 per cent-of training budgets. Streamlining or shedding that work and redeploying a percentage of that budget to more valuable services provides a better return on investment to your organisation and to the company as a whole.

 It will allow your organisation to focus truly on your core value, which in most cases is designing and developing learning to help your company improve its performance and build a competitive advantage. Conclusion: There’s an ongoing demand in the training industry to do more with less. And in times of economic challenges, the added hardship and stress placed on the training organisation is Compounded. Cutting costs is all too often viewed as simply eliminating expenses, when in fact a more productive approach may just be to eliminate waste, streamline processes and embrace efficiency.

The writer is the Vice-President (Client Services) of  Expertus, and  can be reached at mohanark@expertus.com