Training industry to get travel-style booking network

Enterprise Study | August 2003

Enterprise Study Network (ESN), a suppliers' network to bring travel industry-style search and reservations functionality to the training industry, is launched today. The long-overdue application will provide 'flight-style' booking of training courses for the training industry.

Enterprise Study today announced it is launching the next phase of its training administration systems' technology, ESN, that will improve communications across the training industry.

ESN is a tool that enables training providers to manage their clients' on line requirements: booking management, real time reporting, intelligent scheduling and client-specific terms and conditions. Individual training suppliers can provide their clients with an aggregated schedule of courses presented via the Internet and training buyers can request multiple training suppliers' schedules, viewed through a single client interface. ESN is a technology that enables buyers and suppliers to collaborate, maintaining their chosen client-supplier relationships and significantly lowering the administrative overhead associated with buying and sourcing training.

Richard Williams, sales director, Enterprise Study: "The training industry has no way of knowing what courses are available other than by contacting individual training providers. This is very time-consuming. It results in the staff at training companies searching amongst their suppliers to find suitable courses for their customers, often involving many telephone calls to check availability and to negotiate reseller rates. In other industries, for example travel and hotels, 'service aggregators' offer an established way for customers to quickly identify a suitable flight, travel ticket or hotel accommodation from a large pool of potential suppliers.

"Partners will be able to browse ESN to identify courses: by location, course type, price and availability, across their chosen list of suppliers."

"Galileo International provides a similar service for the travel industry and it is Enterprise Study's aim to become a 'Galileo' of the training industry, serving the training-provider community and the end customer. With these 'similar' network services in other industries, the buyer retains their customer relationship with the service provider. "This is also how ESN works," added Williams.

Enterprise Study is inviting training providers to publish their course schedules into ESN. Contact Richard Williams for details, rwilliams@enterprisestudy.com.

The upload process is also automated, with ESN and training providers' systems dynamically exchanging course schedule and reservations data, thus removing any ongoing administration.

"ESN overcomes the issue of training providers having to upload their schedules directly into many of their client's ERP systems. This is particularly an issue when training providers do not know in advance how many bookings they will receive and, if the booking quantity is low, often leads to schedule updates not being completed regularly. With ESN the client uses the ESN service, tailoring access levels to only include those suppliers' schedules approved by the buyer or training provider."

ESN provides aggregated reporting, by supplier, for both end customers and training providers that are delivering managed services contracts.

Global Learning Alliance is one of the early adopters of Enterprise Study's technology and Rob Clarke is their marketing director: "Global Learning Alliance manages large training projects and we need a method of aggregating the course schedules of our suppliers around the world so that our project managers and customers can collaborate together - identifying training courses and resources. We've used the technology successfully in several international projects and we are currently building a global course schedule using ESN. Our suppliers in around 40 countries - across EMEA, Asia Pacific and North and South America have already uploaded their schedules and we're hoping to be able to quickly extend it to the rest of our network."

Ben Pike is operations director with leading UK IT training provider Xpertise: "ESN promises to be extremely useful system. It's concept of one central database made available over the internet is already proving helpful in reducing the administrative overhead of working with our worldwide training partners in the delivery of global skills development programmes."

Don Taylor is partnerships director with skills management software provider, InfoBasis: "ESN bridges the technology gap between training providers and end customers and allows buyers to see a their centrally-pooled schedule of courses from a select group of training suppliers. Our skills management system ESI (Enterprise Skills Infrastructure) integrates with Enterprise Study's technology, extending the skills management solution that we are able to deliver to corporate enterprises."

Further information for providers and buyers:
Training providers requiring details about uploading course schedules to ESN and training buyers requiring information about using ESN should contact Richard Williams, rwilliams@enterprisestudy.com.

Ends

Enterprise Study Ltd acknowledges the use of trademarks contained in this press statement.

Notes to editors

About Enterprise Study
Enterprise Study provides training business administration systems: Enterprise Study Platform (ESP) and Enterprise Study Network (ESN).

ESP is a scaleable training business administration system, for individual corporate training departments and commercial training providers, that manages the day-to-day administration involved in running a training operation: instructor-resource management, personal development plans and certification management, customer relationship management, booking management and e-commerce, management reporting, evaluation and measurement, skills tracking, legacy systems toolkit, finance management, learning content library and scheduling.

ESN is an aggregated network of training suppliers proving a single point of entry for customers to search and book courses through: customer catalogue, third party supplier interface for uploading course schedules, aggregated supplier management, collaborative reporting and third-party supplier collaboration.