Understanding a Training Management System
We have discussed a lot about eLearning Management Systems in our various posts. Now let us understand bit in detail about the Training Management System and its benefits in Learning and development process.
What is Training Management System (TMS) and what it does?
Training Management System(TMS) is a perfect tool for training providers to manage the training administration and operation with minimum possible effort. TMS is usually mixed or misunderstood with Learning Management System(LMS) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM). TMS is the key platform for any training organization to manage the entire training operation.
It gives you complete flexibility to manage your business operation including integration of all your daily hassles in the business of training. It also helps in integrating various business tools to manage your business smoothly. This helps in optimizing business and operation profit due to automation with the help of various tools easily integrated with the single system. This means a lot to your training business and no dependency on one of the off-the-shelf solutions. This customization and integration helps in smooth business functions.
Is it necessary to have TMS?
Managing courses and its content becomes hectic task in the long run for any training department. It requires a lot of coordination and interaction between team members of various departments to ensure everything is perfect over the period of time. For a single course to be delivered there is lot to manage like adhere to schedule, availability of classroom, instructor schedule, and offcourse the course material. You also need to ensure that students get timely notification about the course. If there is any change in the schedule student needs to be informed well in advance.
Managing all this becomes very hectic with the spreadsheets and manual intervention, so using a good Training Management System(TMS) can definitely be of great help. It helps in collating the entire process in one platform and performs the operations in a better and optimized way. It can save you a lot of time, man hours, and offcourse money.
Features of a Good Training Management System
There are many Training Management Systemsavailable that come with distinct features to match your business objectives. Following are a few essential features a good Training Management Systemhas:
- Course management System (CMS): A well-integrated Course management system can help you upload and manage the course content online from your Training Management System. This backend feature helps you keep your online training content always up-to-date without any hassles. If you make any edit through the backend, it will automatically update the same at the front-end website too for the user. You can keep on adding new courses, start selling and accept the payment online for the same with ease to the learners.
- Customer Relationship management (CRM): It is important to have a central place to store all your important business data and what can be best than a full-fledge secured CRM. It can store all important data of the prospects, customers, vendors, staff, and other stakeholders of the business. This can help you find the important business credentials at any point of time without any hassles. You can also keep it up to date by editing the new information about any contact in your database.
- Learning Management System: It is a front-end system wherein you can have an eLearning Platformfor the students. You can create your own account, upload the courses and content, start selling to the customers, and take online payment. You can start your eLearning business with utmost ease with the help of such TMS.
- Marketing & Sales Management: Marketing and sales aspect is very important if we talk about eLearning platform. Just having the platform is not sufficient but can create landing pages and forms to attract new customers. You can easily track all the leads coming from this form and send them customized emailers for follow-up to ensure that they sign up.
- Reporting:Another important element as every next plan depends on the reports fetched from the system. A thorough analysis is done on the existing reports and new plans are made accordingly. You can easily fetch reports for each course uploaded and easily know their performances. Since the report feature is automated in the system, every time you try to pull the report, it will give you the fresh and updated report.
Does TMS help in saving?
The investment you do in your new TMS should help you in saving time and money. In order to ensure your eLearning management systemis helping you achieve the objective, ensure it is used efficiently. Most of your repetitive work can be handled by the TMS and hence helping your staff in saving a lot of time as well.
Factors that can save time:
- Integrating various tools with the single system can help in saving time of your staff. They can easily manage entire business process through a single login based secured system rather than having multiple tools for each aspect of the business.
- Integrating TMS and Website to ensure you save a lot of time of your staff by not asking them to make the same entry twice in both the systems. Course management system will ensure the course once uploaded on the TMS will be showcased on the website.
- Centralization of business process can help in saving the time of your staff and integrating the rest of business process can also ensure that your department heads and their associate optimize their efficiency. Like attendance management can be easily done through the system rather than having multiple entries done at various levels.
- Notification alerts can help your organization and its staff to take care of various tasks. It can help in setting up email triggers for various updates during an event. Once you fix the trigger, email is sent automatically on the occurrence of the event.
Factors that can save money
- Optimizing your current staff can save you big money. Do not rush to hire a new staff to do additional task, optimizing the process with the help of TMS can ensure get more work done with the same resources. This can also help in saving your overhead cost.
- If you are using multiple paid tools or systems, see if your new TMS can help in integrating some free tools or it has in-built feature available so that you don’t have to pay for the other features. You can save a lot on your monthly bills.
You should not get confused with the terms like Training Management System(TMS), CRM and CMS; we have tried explaining above the differences and also the features.