Desktop Delivery with LearnLive Delivers Huge Cost-Savings for Grant Thornton
"Last year LearnLive paid for itself very quickly, with savings in the first six months well into six figures. We've been able to take classes that were delivered as 3 or 4 day live, in-person programs, some with as many as 100 participants, and deliver those to the desktop. When you eliminate costs including travel, food, lodging and materials, it is very significant. We will go from 120 webcasts two years ago to nearly 300 this year without adding any staff or infrastructure."
Richard A. Rykhus
Director, Strategic Learning, Grant Thornton LLP
Customer: Grant Thornton LLP
The people in the independent firms of Grant Thornton International Ltd provide personalized attention and the highest quality service to public and private clients in more than 100 countries. Grant Thornton LLP (www.GrantThornton.com) is the U.S. member firm of Grant Thornton International Ltd, one of the six global audit, tax and advisory organizations. Grant Thornton International Ltd and its member firms are not a worldwide partnership, as each member firm is a separate and distinct legal entity.
Problem/Solution
- Reduce travel back to local office for attendance at conference room webcasts
- Automate webcast CPE processing
- Design and test for individual understanding and not for group understanding
- Integrate webcast platform and delivery with LMS
- Expand webcast platform to customers and marketplace, without taking on burden of back-office functions once the webcast is complete
ROI
"Last year LearnLive paid for itself very quickly, with savings in the first six months well into six figures. We've been able to take classes that were delivered as 3 or 4 day live, in-person programs, some with as many as 100 participants, and deliver those to the desktop. When you eliminate costs including travel, food, lodging and materials, it is very significant. We will go from 120 webcasts two years ago to nearly 300 this year without adding any staff or infrastructure."
Additionally, with LearnLive Grant Thornton was able to reduce time spent on webcast CPE processing by 80%, which includes less money spent on overtime and reduced hiring of temps who would typically input data, while providing its professionals access to more current and up-to-date records.
To that end, Grant Thornton has made a permanent shift to its virtual university, having found from its professionals that coursework delivered to the desktop is equally, or in some cases, more effective and engaging compared with face-to-face programs.
Says Rykhus, "what had previously been live, in-person programs have been converted into a series of live, virtual programs. Our professionals can login wherever they are (say at client site), and are no longer required to travel, which has saved us thousands of man hours which can be turned instead into billable hours."
Moreover, with LearnLive Grant Thornton's "Learning Culture" have been changed forever, including huge gains in how their course work is designed and delivered. "With participation at the desktop instead of the conference room, we can engage our professionals differently within the actual coursework. Now we ask fewer group questions and professionals are more engaged. This is reflected in our increased learning satisfaction scores, which averaged 5.76 with Saba Centra, but with LearnLive have gone up to 5.94," says Rykhus.
This also has greatly improved how the company evaluates the coursework itself: participation in course feedback and evaluation jumped from 30-40% to more than 70% since it was able to embed evaluation links within the LearnLive platform.
Data Reporting
"LearnLive is a firm that delivers very personalized client service; it understands our business, and it works very hard to accommodate our needs. For our data reporting needs, LearnLive went beyond what is standard to help us measure what we need to measure. Now we receive a report that is a snapshot of the entire relationship, including a summary page illustrating internal vs. external webcasts, purchased courses, and more."
Peer-to-Peer Advice:
For Rykhus, there are three keys to deploying and evaluating an eLearning and professional development initiative:
- Ensure you are focused on business alignment and a real business need, for example helping in some measureable ways to improve business, i.e. decrease risk, improve customer satisfaction/ improve productivity
- Endeavor to deliver robust, rich and appropriate program design that matches your target audience needs and enables the participants to gain the most out of the program and ultimately perform better
- Define a measurement plan based on the business need, and review the control data before and after: Did we improve productivity? Did student scores go up?
