Mismanaged LMS systems data led to inefficiency, loss of productivity, and lack of reporting

The Issue: 

When I started one job, part of my duties included LMS Administration. The system was a mess. There were approximately 750 employees in the company and none of their records were automated. Additionally, there were 173 unique learning plans, and very little in the way of reportable numbers. No one in the management of the company had any idea what was actually going on with their training and my predecessor just kept telling them that everything was fine.

The Solution: 

The first thing that I did was set up automatic updates by connecting the LMS to the HRIS system. This allowed me to automatically import new hires, deactivate terminated employees, and adjust training for employees that changed roles or position.

The next thing that I noticed was that the vast majority of training did not have due dates attached to them. Since nothing was due the system would not report it as being overdue, which meant that the compliance reports were artificially inflated to show that everyone was completing their annual required training on time. I immediately corrected this and then set up automatic weekly reports to the department heads.

The last thing I tackled was the 173 specific learning plans. These were all custom-built by job title so that every job title in the company had its own, unique training plan. This created a lot of artificial work. If one course was changed by our oversight agency or due to regulations, we might have to go in an manually adjust 40 or 50 training plans, which also increased the chances that one of them might be missed. Instead, I instituted a complete paradigm shift and introduced a functional training approach. I was able to reduce the number of training plans down to 32 specific functional areas, none of which had any direct overlap with each other. This also allowed us to automate the assignment of the learning plans based on a combination of job title and site assignment.

The Results: 

This automation with HRIS feature alone saved my department 18 man hours per week, a savings of $29,250 in productivity in the first year alone.

The addition of due-dates and automatic weekly reports took our compliance percentage from 37.5% in the first month I was there to 94.6% by the end of the first quarter. We consistently maintained a 94%+ compliance rating at every reporting period for the next 13 quarters consecutively, and we were the only company in the state of Arizona with larger than 400 employees to achieve this metric.

The curriculum redesign allowed us to save another 15 hours of productivity per week. This resulted in an additional savings of $24,375 in productivity per year.

All of the additional time saved allowed the training department to expand into other areas that we did not previously have the capacity to meet, including developing new content, facilitating more courses, and bringing our CPR training in-house, which ultimately resulted in an additional yearly savings of $9,500.

All combined, the annual cost savings resulted in $63,125 in efficiency increases for the company.