What is a Learning Management System and Why Do You Need One?
With a learning management system - or LMS - you can launch your own online portal for employee training
and implement gaming elements like competitions, achievement systems and ratings. In this article we’ll
outline what it is, how it works and how it can help you.
Case Studies
What is LMS?
A learning system is a platform for online education. The key principles of its work lie in the
abbreviation itself.
With the help of automated learning management, you create a single database of
electronic courses and training materials. Such a base is a real storehouse of knowledge
in your field. With it, you can maintain and increase your company’s internal expertise.
You can manage courses and students. Unlike file-sharing platforms,
learning management software is not just a file dump but a well-organised system where
you manage the process. All you have to do to kickstart the learning process is add
employees and assign courses to them. Have you recruited beginners? Send them
invitations to an electronic class for an introductory course. Shedding sales? Send
managers to practice with virtual clients. After all, management is also about the
connection between success in learning and the solution of daily business tasks.
Even if your employees are in different cities, you can train them all without
leaving your own office. In addition, learning management software automates all the
most boring and monotonous work, such as checking, collecting statistics and preparing
reports.
It turns out that LMS is something like your own online university. The system helps to create and store
e-learning courses, provides students with access to them and helps you evaluate results.
What Tasks Does a Learning Management System Help With?
The obvious advantage of using LMS is that such a system saves time and money on trainers' visits and
helps maintain unified standards of work in the branches, draw up individual development plans and
obtain visual progress statistics.
Here are some examples of tasks that companies can thus effectively solve:
- Adapting newbies
- Regular training of employees
- Training of employees in branches
- Conducting attestations
- Preparation of a personnel reserve
- Creating a single internal knowledge base
- Training of partners and clients
What are the Main Features of LMS?
Let's look at how to organise training with LMS. Most of the services are cloud-based - that is,
you don’t have to download, install and configure the program. All you have to do is connect to the
Internet and register a company account.
Download Courses
To start learning, you need to download training materials in the LMS. The software
recognises standard presentations, audio / video clips, documents and special
SCORM-courses.
If you have a large number of materials on one topic, it will be a good idea to combine them
into the Training Program for a consistent and comprehensive study. With this function, you
can customize the order of passing lessons, evaluation criteria and, if desired, issue
certificates to users.
Add Users
The feature of LMS is the availability of different user roles. In any system, there are
always three main roles:
-
User, i.e. a student. This is the most common role. Users can take their own courses and
materials available for free study.
-
Author. A user with author rights can manage learning materials: add and remove courses,
and assign courses to ordinary users.
-
Administrator. In addition to working with educational materials, the administrator can
add and remove users, group them and assign roles. In small companies, the author and
administrator are often the same person.
Good management software tends to relieve administrators of monotonous work automating the
process of adding users to the system. For example, invite users by email, share a link for
self-registration or import a list from a CSV or XLSX file.
Estimate the Result
The ability to measure the effectiveness of training is one of the main reasons why more and
more companies are starting to use learning management systems. It does not matter how many
users you have - 5 or 5 000 - with LMS you will be able to track their progress real-time.
Detailed statistics will show how much time students spend on studying materials and what
progress they have.
Don’t Miss the Opportunity to Advance
Many companies are trying to disown the introduction of such systems as from excessively expensive and
unnecessary. But these misconceptions can lead to the loss of significant competitive advantages.
Most supply experts appreciate the benefits of LMS, referring to the fact that one distribution center
after the introduction of such a system can cut costs by 15%.
Investments in LMS can be a priority for companies, but many are still reluctant to take this step.
In some cases, the reasons for such resistance - such as the lack of a large work team to automate
the control of its work - are understandable and justified. However, in other cases, the lack of
enthusiasm for installing LMS can only talk about an outdated and inadequate assessment of its work.
Below are some of the reasons that companies refer to when deciding not to install LMS, as well as the
benefits that they lose as a result.
Reason 1: A Dood LMS will be Expensive, and we can not Afford it
Some known LMS variants are really expensive, the cost of their implementation and support can reach $ 1
million - at the same time, their functionality will cost every cent spent.
Today's market also includes numerous LMS offers, many of which provide all the necessary features. The
average cost of the system is much less than the six-figure amount, while the system works really well.
Do not think that your company can not participate in the LMS initiative just because it is not ready to
finance a top-level system. Many of your goals can be achieved for part of the price, and the rest you
can buy in the process. Or you can order a custom LMS system and integrate only the features you need.
Moreover, you will just pay once for a solution that will be beneficial and cost efficient in the long
run.
Our Achievements:
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Reason 2: LMS Requires too much Time and Effort to Collect Data on Individual Performance from Day to
Day
Detailed accurate indicators are the lifeblood of LMS. But if you already have a warehouse management
system in place, it already stores transaction logs and maintains detailed records, which means it
collects most of the necessary information.
Of course, this information may not be in the exactly required LMS format. But this can be solved
either by making your existing WMS an additional LMS option, or using IT personnel to create a
script that will integrate WMS and LMS.
And if you still need to enter data into spaces, a
stand-alone interactive information center will become a viable solution. And you can always see how
the results of employees' performance change by the example of existing work processes.
Reason 3: Our Company will not Benefit from LMS, because we are Already doing a Good Job of Measuring
and Recording Indicators
Each warehouse manager is worth his salary and, of course, monitors and evaluates the efficiency of
working hours. Despite this, only a few are able to make monitoring at such a detailed level as LMS
gives.
The managers who have started using such systems were surprised by the high degree of accuracy of the
data. According to one of these managers, LMS allowed its facility to work better and establish adequate
performance standards, even for those events that already seemed to be brought to ideal levels.
Another manager talks about how LMS helped to identify employees who are in greatest need of
coaching or additional training, and it was not always the employees that he could call himself. The
figures showed that some of the least productive employees are actually much more effective, because
more effort is
needed in their work. And in this case it is necessary to speak not about the
replacement of the manager or about the improvement of his qualification, but about the detuning of
the business processes that prevent the employee from showing the results that the company wants
from him.
LMS also allows you to "catch" and detail features that other operating systems and methodologies can
not classify: approximately 15 percent of the unproductive time from each shift, which can free an
additional employee daily. When this time becomes measurable, it becomes much more manageable and,
ultimately, more controllable. This area can be where your company faces the most difficulties on the
cost issues.
Clients
Reason 4: If LMS doesn’t Show Immediate Results, it's Unlikely that we can Afford to use it
Just as Rome was not built in one day, the journey that will lead to maximum efficiency can not be fast.
It takes some time for even advanced users to achieve a good speed for working with the system. And it
can take even more time to try all the features and see how they can work on your particular operation.
Commitment to operational discipline is also necessary, because even small nuances, for example, waiting
for a new temporary employee to arrive within a few days, or sharing one ID among several trained
employees, can distort the reliability of information, which will ultimately affect the system as a
whole. The advanced management system can do great things, but only if you are careful in the very
beginning.
Reason 5 : Given all these Reservations, it's Just not Worth it
At the moment, you are probably aware that the creation of LMS is not such a simple process as you would
like. But here's the good news: it's worth it, especially in labor-intensive industries, where staffing
is usually one of the biggest variables in pricing. Calculate ROI. Look at the options available. And
consider the opportunity to develop your own software in compliance with your requirements.
Contact us to discuss how we can help you ameliorate your corporate education with the bespoke learning
management system.
