In this afternoon’s discussion, we focus on how ESS 2.0 drives significant cost savings relating to employee self-service application training.

Training – Manual vs. ESS 1.0 vs. ESS 2.0
Training – Usability… The more you have of usability, the less you need of training. As previously discussed, ESS 2.0 sets a new bar for self service usability, and thus significantly reduces training costs associated with application use. So, let’s now take a longer look at the costs associated with self-service application training and again as we have done in previous postings we’ll look at this from a ‘bottoms-up’ approach starting with thinking about the specific approaches to ‘learning to use’ an application from a knowledge worker perspective (e.g. employee or manager- deskbound).

Options for training range from traditional ‘classroom’ training, to online training approaches and now with ESS 2.0 ‘in-process’ training. Industry figures for typical IT classroom instructor led training peg the cost per seat at $500 per day (equipment, training hour pay, classroom lease, curriculum development). Advantages of the classroom training experience are spontaneous question and answer, careful instruction on the ‘how to’, controlled testing and evaluation of progress while the disadvantages include time away from work, costs, and something many times overlooked – knowledge retention. Knowledge retention tends to quickly evaporate once the user returns to the normal work environment especially for tasks that are completed on an irregular basis (think back to previous posts about medium and low frequency ESS/MSS transactions).

With the advent of the Internet and ESS 1.0, eLearning quickly took shape as the next generation of training where users could remain at their desks and run online training applications consisting of a multimedia course experience and various forms of online testing to ensure the knowledge was obtained. Advantages of online training include ‘in-time’ learning, lower costs per training module, repeat training (can rerun the training module at their convenience) while the key disadvantage is that this training normally occurs “out of process”. Think about this for a minute, the user needs to locate the specific training application, start it up, register, locate the specific module in question, run the training, shut the application down, then fire up the application, and execute the business process.

Now ESS2.0 takes training to a new level of usability by incorporating the notion of ‘in-process’ training. Instead of having to ‘fire up’ a separate learning module or register for ‘classroom’ training, the user would simply be ‘in process’ or for example, in the employee promotion business application/process and simply click on the training video that directly relates to ‘how to do this process’. There also could be updated corporate policy information about the process ‘embedded’ in the specific process. Or ‘first timer’ information… Or frequently asked questions – FAQs on the particular topic at hand. And with the ESS 2.0 environment, the help, video, FAQ’s and knowledgebase information are all easily manageable by the HR department analyst. There is no requirement for IT development or quality assurance staffing to maintain or update the ‘in-process’ training.

So how can we monetize this benefit? From a training perspective, this transaction takes on a couple of unique characteristics in addition to the previous discussion like the frequency of the transaction (e.g. hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually); the complexity of the transaction (e.g. time approval vs. pay increase approval; system processing such as read/write data - workflow); and the involvement of other employees and associated salaries/overhead, in the transaction (e.g. managers, employees, HR analysts, developers, support personnel). The additional critical characteristics here would be comparing the ‘in-time (ESS 1.0)’ training time vs. the ‘in-process (ESS 2.0)’ training time and the relative costs associated with each (e.g. online course development vs. quick ‘YouTube’ style training videos).

Again, to help our understanding of the business value of HCM self service delivery, we’ll continue to use our example, ABC Corporation, a fictitious 30,000 person organization that we refer to throughout our mini-series here on “Driving Business Value”. In the case of ABC Corporation, we have 26K employees and 4K managers that make up the workforce. To help us get a handle on how ESS 2.0 helps to mitigate training costs we will take a look at transaction frequency by modeling high, medium and low frequency employee/manager self service transactions and the comparative training times associated with each.

So let’s focus on the employee self service side of the training equation and zero in on a high frequency employee transaction, say ‘time entry’, which is a process executed by employees on a nearly daily basis. In the 2.0 world, the corporate portal is up on the employee desktop all day and that employee remains signed in to the system throughout the work day. Each and every day – the employee can quickly click on the time entry app, enter the time and cost centers for their activities without logging into completely separate systems to accomplish the task. Corporate Time Entry policies can be immediately posted to this screen making quick dissemination of new information easy, accurate and very targeted to the specific employee use case.

Now compare this to the ‘1.0 World’ and you can immediately see that by having to deal with separate systems, log ins, and processes, while considering the potential issues that you incur in dealing with these complexities and therefore the need for additional training, you can rationalize the fact that with ESS 2.0 you would experience significantly less time (e.g. 50% reduction of ESS 2.0 transaction training time) requiring training as you would experience in an ESS 1.0 environment.

The Bottom Line?

So with this information we can now model estimated training savings associated with ESS/MSS transactions at ABC Corporation since we have the necessary inputs to calculate total transactions and percentages of said transactions requiring support (e.g. # of employees – 30K; time associated with various transaction types; frequency of example transactions; estimated average salary and overhead for the majority of our employees; estimated average salary and overhead for the support personnel; and percentages of transactions requiring training in the ESS 1.0 environment as compared to the ESS 2.0 environment). In terms of training savings for employee and manager self service transaction of all frequencies, we can conservatively estimate over $1.1M per year in savings for ABC Corporation associated with ESS 2.0 self service delivery for HCM.

Tomorrow morning “How ESS 2.0 Drives Significant Savings in Employee and Manager Self Service Development, Deployment and On-going Maintenance”