Today’s business climate is more competitive and complex than it has ever been. For many companies, this las led to a constant struggle to achieve success while efficiently managing costs and resources. In this environment, the people you employ represent the most critical asset for the ongoing viability of the business. Where in the past, hiring the best talent and providing them with the training they need was enough, today’s leaders are looking beyond that to (what is commonly referred to as ) the “Extended Enterprise”.
The Extended Enterprise refers to participants in the company’s ecosystem that are (technically) outside of the organization, such as channel partners, vendors, consultants, and customers. The goal of incorporating the extended enterprise into your training program is in helping these entities become more knowledgeable regarding your company and its offerings, to everyone’s benefit.
The Benefits of Extended Enterprise Training
Extended enterprise training is designed to help increase sales, while driving down costs and enhancing the customer experience. And while incorporating the extended enterprise into your training program can mean additional effort for your training team, the benefits can make it worthwhile.
Some these benefits can include:
Increased Revenues
Creating and extended enterprise training program can help to drive more revenue by ensuring that your channel partners have the knowledge they need to sell your company’s offerings and more effectively represent your brand in the marketplace. It can also provide your customers with the tools and knowledge they need to have the best possible experience with your organization, which can help ensure their loyalty to your brand and even enhance word-of-mouth advertising.
Decreased Costs
An extended enterprise training program can strengthen the working relationship between your company and its supply chain. This enhanced knowledge exchange can help to increase efficiencies and drive down the cost of operations. And incorporating your customers into the training program can help reduce your expenses associated with services and support.
Enhances Your Brand
One of the major and overriding benefits of extended enterprise training is in the opportunity to strengthen your brand. In creating an infrastructure that addresses the questions, needs, and concerns of third-party entities, these outside organizations and individuals are more likely to become ambassadors of your company and brand.
An LMS for Extended Enterprise Training
The ongoing advancement of cloud-based technologies has made online learning, or “eLearning” the preferred method of corporate training, and this includes extended enterprise training. When compared to classroom-based training, eLearning has proven to drive down costs while enhancing the learner experience by offering a level of convenience and flexibility that classroom-based training cannot match.
The core technology that drives and supports eLearning programs is a Learning Management System, or “LMS”. And while there are now a number of options available for LMS deployment, there are two distinct deployment options that have proven to be very well-suited for extended enterprise training.
Cloud-Based
Working with a cloud-based LMS, offered by a third-party vendor, can provide your organization with all of the powerful benefits an LMS offers, without the need for making a large, up-front investment to deploy the system on-premises. And with a cloud-based LMS, the vendor is responsible for the ongoing management and maintenance of the system, thus freeing up your team to simply focus on the creation of great training content and programs.
Multi-Tenant
A relatively new architectural development in LMS technology is in multitenancy. While a single tenant LMS dedicates the entirety of the application infrastructure to use by a general audience, a multi-tenant LMS allows you to “spin up” new instances of the application to support varied and diverse training audiences through the creation of “private” eLearning environments (portals). A multi-tenant LMS architecture is particularly well-suited for extended enterprise training as it allows you to scale and segment your training program to meet the unique training needs of each of your various audiences.
LMS Portals: An Extended Enterprise LMS
LMS Portals provides our clients and partners with a cloud-based, multi-tenant LMS that is uniquely suited to support extended enterprise training. In working with LMS Portals, you are able to launch to training portals on-demand, in minutes. And each portal you launch will have its own branding, user onboarding system, messaging tools, analytics engine, and more.
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