How Training Teams Can Utilize Data-driven Decision Making

But spreadsheets, calendars, emails, instructors, curriculum, registrants, training delivery. Managing training is complex. But administrate can simplify your operations plan, organize, automate, deliver and scale your training program all in one platform with administrate.

Hello. Hello and welcome to today's Training Industry Leader to Digital Transformation and Learning, sponsored by IDL Learning Administrate at studio Litmus and What Fix? I'm Dee Corigliano, your producer and host for today. Before we dive into our first session, I'd like to quickly go over a few housekeeping items to help you interact with our speakers and get the most out of today's sessions. Throughout today's event. Please feel free to chat comments into the chat window and submit questions in your Q&A window. I'll be monitoring your comments and saving your questions for Q&A toward the end of the session. I've been able to close captions for this event. You may select an order of subtitles by locating the closed captions icon in your toolbar. I encourage you to share the information you received today via social media by following our handle at trading in the street.

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Visit Training Industry icon to learn more. Now, without any further ado. It is my pleasure to introduce you to our speaker, John Peebles. He is CEO of Administrate and Admit, an innovative training management platform for enterprise learning and development operations, serving hundreds of organizations and millions of learners across the globe. Administrate enables training teams to organize, plan, deliver, automate, analyze and scale enterprise training operations all from a single system. Prior to administrate, Mr. Peebles helped found Fort Lauderdale based Sentry Data Systems, where he served as chief information officer and vice president of operations. While it grew to more than $30 million in revenue within five years. He is passionate about education, teamwork, technology and mental health in the workplace and often speaks on these subjects around the world.

John, please take it away. All right. Thank you very much. Well, I'm sharing my screen. It was great to see everybody logging in from all over the world. I am dialing in from our headquarters here in Scotland and really happy to be with you all today and talk through some things that I think are really important that we're really passionate about here at Administrate. So as as we mentioned, you know, what is in ministry? Just a kind of level set here. And why am I different than just any other guy talking? Administrate is effectively training operations, infrastructure. So our software will help you manage everything that goes on within a typical training environment, whether it's employee focused environment, whether you're focused on customers or external parties or whatever.

We were built for the administrator, dealt them make make their lives much easier. And so we'll be kind of talking about a couple of themes that we're really passionate about here today. And we've got a few takeaways that we're hoping you'll leave with. And that is, you know, sometimes our aspirations as training leaders can get ahead of technology. So everybody that's on this dialed in, you dial in for a reason. You're passionate about what you do. You want to be the best you can in your field and in. You know, it's not uncommon to see leaders really, really have these grand inspirational ideas that they want to implement. And sometimes that can be limited by technology. The other concept that we think is really important to understand is that often adding more software tools to your tech stack or the collection of systems that you use within your environment can create complexity and problems much faster than it will provide solutions.

And that's a painful thing for me to actually talk about because I'm a I'm an engineer by training. I really love technology. I think it can be a transformative thing, but it has to be applied correctly. And then the third takeaway would be we need to find software that supports a comprehensive data model for training, and we'll talk about what that is and why that's important. And I'll be checking in on the chat. Let's make this informal. I you know, if you've got questions, throw them in there. I may not be able to get to everything and we'll have some time for Q&A later on. So definitely welcome any interaction via chat and get started here. We did one of these about, I don't know, six, seven, eight months ago, and our team came and said, You've got this, we've got this great opportunity to speak to a great group of people over at training industry.

And they said, you know, you work really hard on the topic and make sure it's relevant and it is really emphasizing themes around data and how important it is for all. And and so I did that. I spent time, I really did a lot of research and I came back with an entire presentation that was focused on how serial killers relate to L.A. and training team data. And and so after that, we kind of had a conversation about how that went. And I was like thinking this is great and so forth. And our team was kind of like, you know, maybe for the next time we're going to just do something a little less contrived. All right. And so I met with our content team. We were kicking out all these ideas and I had a bit of travel, and so they kind of selected one. I got back and said, What is it? What's the big idea?

What are we going to do that's non-controversial? And they said, Well, we're going to talk about war in Russia. I said, Okay. So I'm happy to kind of continue the theme maybe a little bit. But we're going to talk about war in Russia That happened quite a long time ago. And it's really a story of how one of the greatest generals in history lost one of the greatest armies in history in a war that was catastrophic to not only his ambitions, but also the lives of many people that were involved. And this is one of the most interesting conflicts, I think, in history. If you're into military history, you know, there's a lot of battles and things that have happened. But this is one of the most interesting ones for me, because it's not only one of the best studied conflicts in history, but it also had one of the biggest tolls to human life in history.

And it's it's really interesting. There's some lessons we can learn from it. And basically, you know, this painting is kind of, you know, my my mom was a history teacher and I learned about Napoleon and I learned about his attempt to invade Russia. And, you know, when I was when we were preparing for this, I was thinking back, you know, what was the key reason why this failed? And it kind of this painting, I think, evokes what many of us would would say if we got put, you know, on the spot, and that was that invading Russia, you're going to run up against winter, winter's cold there. And that's probably what caused Napoleon and his armies demise in this huge catastrophic loss. And that's not actually true. And we'll talk about some of the reasons why. But just to give you a sense of how many people were involved in this, there are about 450,000 men within the French army.

The Grand Army is what it was called. They set off with about 150,000 horses, some 25,000 wagons and almost 1400 pieces of artillery. And it was it was a huge, huge disaster. In less than six months, nearly a million soldiers and civilians died. And so by any measure, that is catastrophic. And, you know, when you think about the preparation, Napoleon was one of the greatest military geniuses ever. Absolutely incredible. General, his his tactics and his battles and theories and so forth are still studied today. And it's like, how could such an incredible general have just gone off and made this blunder? And actually, when you think about it, he was he planned ahead and when you kind of read through some of the preparations that were made, there was a lot of there's a huge attempt to move supplies to the right spots and and make sure that the army was well fed and well-supplied and so forth.

But it didn't work out that way. And really, when you when you think about why there's a quote from a guy who wrote this book on Napoleon's Russian campaign and it says, basically, modern militaries have long been in agreement that Napoleon's military machine at its apex had become an anachronism that could succeed only with the use of railroads and the telegraph. And these had not yet been invented. And actually, you know, there were a few uses of railroads, whatever, but effectively, there were no there was no network or transportation network that could support the logistics required for this campaign. And what does it mean? Right. He never had enough supplies while in Russia. So like I just mentioned, that was one of the largest logistical preparations in history.

All of these horses, hundreds of thousands of tons of supplies were stockpiled in advance. It just wasn't possible to move all of this stuff using horse drawn carts on often dirt roads. When it started raining, these would turn to mud. And add to that, Napoleon was trying to aggressively march into Russia and make headway and the supply chain just couldn't keep up. And so really, when you look at this, Napoleon could have had a million horses or 2 million horses or a million carts, and it wouldn't have helped horse drawn carts. And horses just weren't efficient enough no matter how many he had. And so these aspirations, this incredible ambition, he'd already conquered all of continental Europe and he wanted to continue and conquer even more, were ultimately stopped by the limits of technology.

So even the best general in history can't escape some of these practical realities. And how this relates to us is learning leaders really are plans are only as good as the technology implementing them. And that's kind of frustrating to hear sometimes. I think, you know, all of us have used technology day to day that we're not particularly thrilled with. You know, our team here at Administrate loves Slack. I happen to hate it as a messaging service. It's always distracting me and so forth. But really, when we think about what are we trying to do to move the needle on our business and the plans we have for our organization, our plans are really only as good as the technology implementing them in many cases. So what are some examples that we see where folks in our industry are limited by their tech?

In other words, is learning tech the problem and how are our tech stacks making things worse? And this is kind of a question that we think about a lot that I think many of the folks that we talk to out in the industry are thinking about a lot. And I think, you know, it's sometimes one of those things where we wake up and it's like it's 20, 23 and we've been trying to solve these problems for 20 plus years. When are they actually going to get solved? And, you know, what's the what's the solution here? And so before we dive in a little bit more, it's time for a poll. How well integrated would you say your tech stack is? Take a minute. Think about that. You know, in tech start could be anything from a you know, a tech, a technology like Zoom that we're using today or maybe a survey system.

Maybe you've got a CRM that your main business uses, maybe it's an e-commerce platform. If you're selling your training, maybe it's some sort of feedback mechanism or some lab piece of technology. How well integrated would you say your tech stack is? A Most of our systems are completely disconnected from each other, but we have some integration but is dependent on workarounds and requires a lot of maintenance. See, our systems are connected to each other, but we like to get more advanced and DX were in learning technology, Nirvana and all of our systems are seamlessly interconnected at all times, everywhere, all at once. I did that at the end, but I think you get the sentiment, so just give you a few seconds there.

Melody saying that was the TDI professional trying to get the updated training budget to the C-suite for sure. So here's the here's the responses. You can see that up on the screen. Looks like about a third say there were completely disconnect and almost half say we have some but dependent on workarounds and requires a lot of maintenance. A quarter say our systems are connected to each other. We would like to get more advanced and then nobody is living in Nirvana. So it looks like there's plenty of opportunity here. And one of the things that we see and we think about a lot here at Administrate is our customers are pretty typical. We serve large enterprises that are multinational.

They have a lot of complex training that they're delivering. And like most people in the industry, the majority of their training is still done in a synchronous environment in a classroom environment. Well, whether that's a blended classroom, whether that's a part in person and part remote or all remote classroom training continues to be one of the highest value forms of training that we see out there in corporate America or yes, corporate Europe, because some of us are calling in from Europe. And so one of the problems that we see is if there's all this classroom training that's going on and it's super high that, you know, high value training and it needs to be done really well and the business depends on it. How do we automate the scheduling at scale and what are we up against?

And so this slide kind of gives maybe a represent nation of some of the things that we struggle with or have to think about. And so not only is it the the classroom times and the dates and the locations, but it's also the instructors that are involved. And sometimes there's more than one instructor, there's a team of instructors. Often these classes can be multi-day or multi-week or maybe even stretch on longer. There might be resources that are required. One of the coolest resources I've ever seen that is required for a training training class was one of our customers that's in logistics and shipping. They they do this training where they have this special pool and you get in a helicopter and they hoist it up and everybody straps and they set the helicopter on fire and drop it into the pool.

And it's to simulate a crash. Right. And you have to escape this burning helicopter that you're strapped into while underwater. And you know that that type of stuff. You got to make sure that the pool is free and the thing has been cleaned and there's the locker rooms are all tidied up and so forth. And there's a lot to manage here. Right. And that's before we even get to the learners and are they available? And then you've got all the stuff and then you need to get to system after system after system in order to make sure that it all stacks up. And so every single arrow that you see on this slide and there's these little sneakers in between, because sometimes we're using sneaker net, right? And we're moving information via our shoes or maybe spreadsheets are being emailed around and so on.

Every one of these arrows is a is a problem and can be a difficult thing to overcome, particularly at scale, because it's bad enough if you're trying to plan out some of this training in one location or two. But if you've got hundreds of locations and you're trying to get thousands or tens of thousands of learners through, it can be really, really a nightmare. Frankly. So, yeah, there's a good point from Roy. We see this all the time, which is they're operating in manufacturing environments where the majority of colleagues do not have emails. That just makes things even more difficult. Right? How do you send out reminders? How do you get these people booked on? How do you even give them a username and password sometimes? So these are problems that are very, very difficult to solve. And if our tech isn't working with us, it can be very, very, extremely difficult.

And the thing that always gets me is my mother was a history teacher, so she would love this bit about Napoleon. Maybe not the serial killers so much, but she was a history teacher. And I think, you know, all of us have been to school. All of us have gone to training events and so forth. And yet most people don't realize how much administrative work goes on behind the scenes outside of the classroom. We've all been to a class, but we've never seen the work involved. That has to happen outside and around the classroom.

And so the problem here, though, is it's very difficult to have automated scheduling or things that can help solve these problems with our current tech stacks, because many of us are running on spreadsheets, current learning tech is simply too dependent on finding lists of things, whether it's lists of available meeting rooms or calendar holes and things like that. And putting it into a spreadsheet and then slinging those things around or whiteboards or pieces of paper and so forth. And so, you know, spreadsheets, it pains me because spreadsheets are one of my all time favorite tools, right? I love the power of a spreadsheet and it's amazing. And you can solve so many problems with them. And it was the original killer app for the personal computer, but it means spreadsheets often mean less data integrity.

They're clunky, hard to use. There's no real guardrails, if you will, and there's just too much manual effort. And the more people that need to work in a single spreadsheet, the worse. I'll never forget the time where we were speaking with a very large European training operation and had revenue of more than 150 million a year. And we said, How do you manage this stuff? And they said, Oh, it's right here. And they pulled up the spreadsheet and I was like, Wow, we are looking at $150 million spreadsheet that had all this stuff going through and they had all these rules and color coding and all this stuff, and it was like, Don't touch this, because if you do that, then I'll throw everything else off and so forth. And we were like, Well, how often do people touch that? And they're like, almost every day.

And it's, you know, they're fixing problems all the time. And it's kind of like the Napoleon's problem, right? No matter how many spreadsheets we have, no matter how many horses or wagons that Napoleon's army had, it was is not enough. No matter what you do, it's just not going to be the right solution to this problem. And it hampers us in other ways, too. Right. So when we have stuff trapped away, really critical data like this that is locked away in spreadsheets or people's heads or whiteboards, it means that we have an incomplete data model and a data model meaning what is it about learners and the things they have to do and what are the goals we're trying to to achieve and so forth. And that means if you don't have all your data in a data model that's accessible, then you're going to have a lack of it.

And because of a lack of integration, then you're going to have really, really struggle on decision making and you're going to struggle on this decision making about a whole bunch of things, right? Where are all my learners on their journey? Are they doing the right things? Are they on track? Do we have enough resources? Do is demand planning being fed incorrectly and so forth? And so really, when we think about the problem of land at scale in complex environments with really high importance training, that's often in a synchronous delivery model, we think that land needs to radically rebuild the typical data model from the ground up. And really what we're talking about is can we unlock potential with dedicated infrastructure for L.A.

teams? We'd have to go through a digital transformation because many of us have a lot of tools and systems. I don't think I've ever met a large organization that doesn't have at least one learning management system. For example, many have multiple learning management systems. Many people, many, many organizations will have multiple ways of getting surveys done and so forth. We need dedicated infrastructure that can support these tools and work with them that is built from the ground up for the challenges of teams. And we were talking about manufacturing. I saw somebody mentioned that earlier. You know, this is a pretty typical assembly line. I love this stuff. Right? One of my weird hobbies is model railroads. And I think assembly lines are like some of the world's most complicated, expensive model railroads.

Prior to my previous company, I was also in health care and we had a mail order pharmacy that was like a $15 million assembly line that churned out all these prescriptions and so forth every day. And I loved it. It was one of my favorites. I felt like I was getting paid to play running that thing. And you can see here, so many things have to line up in order for us to produce one of these products. It looks like there might be there might be apples. I think we're we're boxing up apples. So this is a lot simpler than maybe building a car or something that would involve many, many components. But it's still complicated. We need to make sure we have the right boxes. We need to make sure that the apples are there. We need to quality check it, We need to pack them correctly and so forth and so on.

And really, this is no different from the operation of getting training out the door to the right people at the right time at scale. And we need to have a factory that can support us, that can respond, and we can reconfigure the assembly line when we need to. And these factories are all run by software that is resource planning software, very analogous to the struggles that we have as L.A. leaders and, you know, we need something like these conveyor belts here, which is seamlessly carrying material from process to process or station to station from workflow to workflow. And so really, you know, what are the what what do we really need to be solving here?

We need to find a way where we can have visibility and coordination, right? The old model of kind of a bunch of point solution learning tech that leaves data scattered across systems and in no central place is really, really difficult to to manage. And as we grow and as there's more demands on us and we need to conquer new areas of the globe and expand our empires, it's just not going to work. The old paradigm won't work. And really, when we talk about what does the benefits of a central platform give us Will will mention headless architecture. But basically we want to reduce management load. We want teams to not spend more than ten 20% of their time worrying about getting those apples packed into boxes.

We want an assembly line to be automating as much of that as possible, and then we can focus on high value things like what do we need to do to move the needle for our organization? Comprehensive reporting requires central control and access to data. It is very, very difficult to do reporting when you don't have a single spot to go there. We've all experienced this. I mean, just trying to get scheduling done between family members that live in different areas, you know, is very difficult unless we have a shared calendar. And so, you know, magnify that by tons and tons of variables across countries and regions and so forth. It is really, really difficult. We need a central location.

Another principle that I think is really important to make sure we're solving this problem in the correct way is going to have free flow of data, right? Data should be easy to move from function to function, right? We shouldn't have to kind of build anything or have to set stuff up if we need to get data from one team to another and we need to have as many as few manual links in our data model as we can as we can. And this idea of a data lake or this kind of one spot to put everything in is an essential part of this. And, you know, in Scotland we call that a data lock, right? Because a lock is a lake here, but you get the idea, right? One spot to dump all of your data that then people can access it and there's these barriers come down.

And one of the things that we talk about a lot is, you know, you've got this right. If you can ask a question from your data, get a response and then ask another one and do this within seconds, right or max a minute. If it takes a day or a week to get to ask a question and get the response back, we're being held up and our armies are outpacing our supply line. And that that is not what we want to see. All right. The other thing that we like to think about is if you have the right infrastructure, you can then start to build for your organization's unique needs. So, you know, Roy's talking about he's got a need where there's a need where people don't have email addresses all the time, How are we going to solve this problem?

You should be able to, if you've got the right infrastructure, solve for that problem. And, you know, things like security and privacy concerns should be reflected. You might have customer requirements from your business that are really, really important and need to be considered. You know, I'll never get tired of hearing from various training operations what the various rules they have for on canceling a learner, canceling or transferring or moving within, you know, one one class to another edition of the same class. It's just mind blowing how many, many different requirements we've seen out there. You know, some people are like if three days before and the moon phases this, then they get a 50% reduction, that's all fine, right? But you are going to have specific requirements for your operation that are the right things for you to do that are going to be different from those of other organizations.

And, you know, one of the things that you want we want to see is when you have the infrastructure set up and you've got your factory humming along, you again can have it. And this is automate and you're not spending all your time wrangling with spreadsheets. You can start to consult with internal stakeholders and understand how to serve their their use cases.

And that's really important. And I think to on this last point, if you truly oh or if you have this infrastructure, we are seeing more and more organizations today step back and start thinking about how do they truly own the entire learner experience. Now, we've heard a lot in the industry about Alex Pease and so forth and various alums is providing user interfaces, do various things. What we are seeing increasingly is people are saying, Look, I've got all these tools, they're all great. An individual, specific things, but I've got them now knit together with a learning infrastructure. And that means that I can start building on top of that and I can build a learner experience that works for my specific requirements and the things that I have to do to get that learner experience set up and are minimized because I've got this infrastructure behind it.

And that's what we call a headless approach, this idea of using APIs and widgets and so forth to build out an experience that really moves the needle for your operation. Think what you could do if you had all of the operational and so forth, all those concerns of the day automated, and you could actually sit back and design for a true learner experience. It would fit your business things like, you know, if you're a medical device, manufacture, sure, you can ask the learner. You asked the learner to log in when they're logging into your equipment and if their training records aren't up to date and on have a a valid certificate, they can't use this sensitive and expensive piece of equipment, stuff like that. How do you really integrate learning and training with your products and your offerings?

And the hope is we get to something that looks like this, right, where you've still got all your tools, you still got all these investments, but these investments become more powerful, right? And these investments become more integrated. And that means you can make data driven decisions because you've got this platform in this infrastructure that is connected. And these connections could be through a variety of mechanisms, right? It could be an API connection, it could be an off the shelf thing. You could have your own special rules that you've written to your own special systems, you know, things like did the door locks work and let the students in if they haven't been certified into a certain area of the factory or facilities that you manage. Those types of things are possible when you've got this infrastructure.

And so, you know, things like when you're your instructor calendars and your learner calendars are updated, then they get automated email communications sent out to them that are tailored to them. And what they're going to be doing. Central reporting means you can automate the delivery of all of this data to various stakeholders. And so if you've got partners out there that need to understand where things are and where they sit on their journey, if you've got customers that are paying you for training and they want to see where all their employees are, are in their learning journey, that type of data can be automated. And then even simple stuff like we maybe all of us are probably familiar with the idea of sharing meeting rooms. The rest of the business or organization. How do you get that data fed into your infrastructure automatically so that you know, you can schedule room 23 on February 15th of next year and there won't be a conflict, and you can do that automatically.

Those are some of the things that we're talking about. You know, it's interesting. So Napoleon had this incredible military career. He came from pretty much nowhere. The small island off the coast of Italy was made fun of when he was growing up because he didn't speak French very well. He goes on to become one of the greatest military commanders of all time, builds this incredible army with the most powerful armies of all time. And he has tons and tons of success. I mean, he was such an influential force within European history that just about a quarter of a mile away from where I'm standing in my flat here in Edinburgh, there's a monument to the general, the British general, that actually defeated him finally in the Battle of Waterloo.

And, you know, it's that's his his influence lives on. And however, when we think about it, it's like what could have been had he had the correct infrastructure, had he had the correct supply lines. And so he's history's greatest commander, but he needed tech that didn't exist yet. And many of you are some of the best L.A. leaders of your generation, but you just don't necessarily have the tech today. But we do have the technology has been invented and we can choose to adapt a better, more streamlined system for our operations. And, you know, this is one of the very original infographics. So this is made quite a long time ago. And as you can see, it moves from left to right. This is the Army's progress and the numbers of soldiers that were involved as they invaded Russia.

And it's it's in French. But you can see at the end there's this pivotal battle in Moscow. And then if you go from right to left to left, the black line is the amount of soldiers that came back to France. And so you can see at every point of the way, as the soldiers went into Russia from left to right, the force was depleting. They had this massive battle in Moscow. It was one of the most it was one of the bloodiest battles in history up until that point. And then the remnants of that military force had to get back to France. And as they went, they were dying because of starvation. They did not have enough food in order to conduct this campaign. Napoleon himself said the most terrible of all my battles was the one before Moscow. The French showed themselves to be worthy of victory.

They actually won that battle, but the Russians showed themselves worthy of being invincible. Right. And actually, we know today it wasn't anything to do with the Russians. It was this idea of supply chain and infrastructure. And so back to kind of this idea of scheduling, how do we solve this problem? One of the things that we're super excited about, administrate is our AI powered scheduler. And what it does is it takes in all of this data from all these various systems. It lets you plot the things that you want to train and then it can help you solve and provide decision support as you go through and try to match up all these resources to the requirements that you have. We think it is a game changer for Landy and we're really excited about it and we'd love to talk to you more about how we we approach solving this problem.

And so here is a white paper to kind of continue the discussion. We'd love to interact with you on this. In the next slide, I'll have my email up and would love to connect you via LinkedIn. But basically this is a white paper On how enterprise training achieves data decision making, data driven decision making as a roadmap from getting to maybe where Napoleon was to where we want to be as well. And leaders of the right infrastructure.

So I think we have time for a few questions. This is my email address. Send me an email if I'm not traveling, I'll try to respond to you quickly. I would love to connect and I think we've got a little bit of time for a few questions from from you folks. Yes, and we have a few questions. Great. The first one is from Fatima, and it says, What type of data should the lab teams gather and how should we use this data to make decisions and what type of decisions? So technically is a great question. And so I think one of the things that that I would I would tend to say is many of us have activity data at our fingertips right.

We kind of know who got trained on what, when, and that that is probably the easiest data to get. What many of us don't have access to is maybe the data that our organization is tracking around its goals. So if I'm a if I'm in manufacturing, I'm trying to train my workforce, you know, does the R&D team have access to things like manufacture, hiring errors and who is on the assembly line, where and when and if mistakes were made, who is involved, that type of data, that kind of mission critical business data is often not married up with lambda and learning data. I'll give you another example. We have a customer for Drac. They're a large software company, went public a couple of years ago and they needed information about who was going to renew. It's a subscription business and so they have an entire team, a renewals team that's dedicated to make sure that these customers renew and they're at the end of their contracts.

And one of the things that the training team found was by providing training data to this renewals team and giving them a window into the land operations, they could predict who might be at risk of not renewing. Because if you're not going to renew a piece of software, you're probably not going to stay current on your training. And so that was a good bellwether to see, see what happens. So I guess what I'm trying to say is the data that you have mixed that up with the critical data that your organization has, and then you can start to see how you can move the needle. If we train this group of people here, will they be able to much better or easier, more easily achieve the organizational goals over there? And and that's kind of what we'd encourage people to start thinking about. And that's hard, right? Because most of us don't have a way or anywhere to put that data.

And so starting to think about do we have the right infrastructure to grab this data from other parts of the organization, married up with data, and do that many, many times a day? That's the challenge. And I think if we can crack that, then it becomes a lot easier. I think you may have partially or fully answered this next question, but Melody asks, Does this system help with showing return on investment, making it easier to plug into the day to day and call that up when needed? Yeah, that's a great question. So you must have seen a slide of ours from somewhere because we actually talk about the real goal of administrate is to help learning leaders and training teams demonstrate ROI. Right? How do you move the needle from a training activity here to some sort of business objective over there?

And I'll give you an example of how this happened in our own company, right? So we think about train operations and we live and breathe this stuff every day. And a few years ago we launched Administrate University, which is, you know, set of training and a certification process where you can learn about our products and so forth. And we were really excited about this. We worked hard. We put out the content. You all know the drill and the VP in charge came in after we launched and they said, great news. We've had, you know, 50 customers go through that in the first couple of weeks and we were like, Cray, that's great. And you know, the next week there was, you know, the number was going up into the right where we like to see it. Right. And, you know, people are on Slack and they're putting out emojis and celebration things and so forth.

And it's kind of like, okay, great, you know, pretty good job. Fantastic. Well, what happened is over the next few weeks, that VP came in and said, We've taken our Zendesk support ticket data and we've married it up with our ministry university data and we use administrate to run our own university, of course. And they said what we found is that if a customer's users had completed the certification process process successfully, their support ticket volume would go down by half and their net promoter score would go up by 20 points. And it was like at that moment it blew my mind, right? And we said, We're going to move money from this area of the business to administrate university because we are getting a massive ROI on those training activities.

And when you want to double down on that and that's a that's an example from our own business, like we're out here preaching this stuff and yet we can still get caught up in it too. And, and so that's the ROI thing is so important. And that's kind of the ultimate goal here. And that's an amazing statistic to be able to pinpoint also.

Yeah, and we took money that was going to go to hiring more customer support agents and we instead put it in Missouri University and everybody's happier, right? Because nobody wants to have to send in a ticket. They just want to be to know what to do. So it was a great success. So the next question is, do you have applications where you can monitor behavior real time and push learning to employees when issues.

That's it's a super it's a great question. The short answer is administrate does not do that. But that doesn't mean that our customers are not that. And one of the cool things that I love is I go out and big part of my job is speaking to customers, interacting with folks like yourselves and learning how people are using our platform in our in our infrastructure. And so we certainly have had customers basically hook various tools up, and some of them are, you know, knowledge based tools and some of them are, you know, these event driven things and they can tell, hey, you're logged into this part of the system and you know, something pops up. Do you need training? There's plenty of these tools out there. The limiting factor on almost all of them is they don't have anywhere to plug into. And so that's where you can get creative if you've got an infrastructure.

And the other key thing, if you have an infrastructure set up, is you can change tools, right? Something that worked for you two or three years ago, maybe your organization has grown, maybe you have changed, maybe the requirements of are dramatically different today. You can swap out the way that you're doing things and and those transitions when that when that happens. And having that data gives you that picture to work from. Absolutely. And how are how where can we be more effective and where can we, you know, double down and so forth? Okay. So this is kind of a two part question. It's what kind of cost does implementing a data model like this have for a typical business? And what size of department does it become? Does administrative become cost effective?

It's a great question. And I think, you know, I got in trouble with our one VP for talking about serial killers previously, and I would get in trouble with another VP if I started throwing out, you know, blanket cost stuff. But basically what we're looking to do in almost every case is to provide at least A10x Roy, when we come in with it, with a customer. So we're pretty confident that at a minimum we're going to ten X whatever you're spending with us in terms of return for you and your organization. And I think that's a pretty good you know, we might disagree on some things here or there, but I think in general that's a pretty good rule of thumb.

And, you know, when when you think about what is the size of organization where that starts to become important, Well, almost every training operation is going to have some flavor of these of these problems. However, for us, it's kind of like when the organization gets to kind of that 500 to 1000 employee level or above, that's where these problems become really acute. And actually the research shows that as organizations get larger and the training teams get larger, the efficacy and the efficiency of those training teams goes down. And that and that's per per employee. And that's really concerning. Right. And so one of the key goals for administrate would be to arrest that trend and basically put a cap on how many people you need in order to deliver training.

We want to kind of divorce the idea that more training needs more people to deliver it. And and so we've been pretty successful with that. So I guess, you know, it's larger organizations will get way more value. And then we're looking to kind of have a ten X on that on that investment through our Y. And so for a smaller organization, if it were, you know, like a higher in business, they would get the most out of it. Yeah, for sure. I mean, you we have had situations where, you know, a company will come to us, like for Roc, they were small at the time. The training team was only two people. They had just raised funding, they had big aspirations and so forth. And then over the next eight or nine years, they grew to become a publicly traded company with thousands of employees.

But interestingly enough, the training team only grew to about four or five people, and we like to see that, and that's what we want to see. And so, you know, they had tons of success. They started small, but they were ambitious. They got it right from the beginning, from the ground floor, and that made their growth a lot, lot easier. So it's definitely something to consider when you're getting ready to grow. Absolutely. Okay. So the next question is what is the ideal trainer to staff ratio? It's a great question. I think this becomes, you know, industry dependent in many cases. And it depends a lot, right? Like how much training are you delivering? I you know, are you regulated? Is is safety involved and so forth? You know, I don't have a I don't have a blanket answer to that.

But, you know, we you want to see it at least in an order or two of magnitude. I would say, you know, you want to be able to deliver at least ten x the amount of training and to do amount of learners that you have staff. And hopefully it's like 100 acts or more. And the only way you can do that is making sure that you're not using horses and wagons, right? You've got to have the infrastructure in order to to to get those ratios kind of snapping into focus. You know, that's not to say that you can't have that really high leverage without infrastructure. We have seen some examples of that. But you're going to hit a limit. And whatever that limit is, it's coming. But if you're growing and so it's kind of like, well, the flip side of thinking it out as well, you might be doing a great job now, but you could do much more if you didn't have to worry about this day to day grind of the operational challenges.

So we're kind of at the end of our time. I think this would be a great final question. It says what are the three most important features of administrate that you'd like us to be aware of today? It's a great question. So, you know, the three that I think are the biggest differentiators for us is we have this goal of being learning infrastructure and there's not many products, if any, that are out there in the industry that are really, really focused entirely on this problem. So we want to be that infrastructure. And so within that, that means classrooms scheduling your, your I'll T or ville t we're really good at that will help automate 80 90% of that workload integrating because we want to be this infrastructure integrations are really important and the way that we do that is is through our API and integrations and various other strategies you can do with that.

And then the third feature would be our reporting. So reporting, integrations, scheduling and all of that underneath the umbrella of being infrastructure for training teams. So we think a lot and we'd spend all of our time thinking about the administrators challenges and the challenges they have. Hence the name of the company. That's all the time we have for today. But John, I'd really like to thank you for sharing this with us today and just a reminder to people, we will have all of this is recorded and you'll be able to access it afterward. And you can use that QR code to contact you. Thank you so much. Have a nice day, everyone. Thank. Okay.

We will be taking a 15 minute break. But up next, we will have Brian Blakey joining us from ACTIO Learning with ten proven ways LMB can excel in a digital transformation. At the top of the hour, join me in the next session. I will in this one and that will take you back out to the lobby and we will see you there.