By: Bruno Cozzi - Managing Director - Bluegem Software
Wouldn’t it be nice if every process in life could be built once and repeated over and over again with minimal effort, just like a recipe for Nana's favourite chicken soup. Thanks Nana. The recipe’s great but I still have to cut up the chicken, boil the water and stand over a hot stove stirring for 2 hours. Ahhh but that’s because you haven’t heard about Papa’s new Automatic Chicken Soup Wizard. All you have to do is throw in the chicken and vegies, press START, and - hey presto! out come 6 plates of delicious hot chicken soup in less than 5 minutes! Well when you have good Training Management Systems, sometimes called Student Management Systems, or Training Management Software, that’s what’s possible. As an RTO or Training Provider you can create templates (recipes) for many of your day to day processes and use automated workflows (wizards) to run them. The beauty of having a database sitting behind all your day to day business activities is that data can be easily replicated and auto-processed. Let’s say you have an enrolment process that you can step out, something like this.
- Get the student details (let's call him ‘Jack’)
- Find the course and elective units that Jack wants to do
- Find a date, time and place that is suitable
- Make sure the course has space for Jack
- Agree on who will pay and how
- Enrol Jack into the course
- Give him a confirmation letter
- Send a tax invoice to whoever is paying, or accept payment now and send a receipt
So how do Templates and Wizards help us with this process. Well for a start you could decide that you want Jack (or his employer) to do all the work to enroll Jack into the course; or you may want to keep control of the process yourself. Both options are available. So let’s say you allow Jack to enrol himself.
- Jack goes to an online Enrolment Wizard that gives him all the help he needs to find the course he wants, choose the best time and place, fill in his details, select a payment method (including credit card online), and finalize the enrolment. At the end he gets a confirmation letter and a tax invoice. You get notification that Jack is enrolled.
- So how was Jack able to find the information he needed? - Because earlier you’d already set up the courses, timetables, payment options, Confirmation Letter, and Tax Invoice. To do that you used templates and wizards. You only had to do that once, now Jack and all his work mates can enrol themselves into your courses the same way. There’s now minimal effort on your part.
Now we can take a closer look at these templates and wizards and see what makes them tick. Keep in mind we’re not talking “Lord of The Rings” here. These wizards are pretty standard operating procedures that you would use every day in your training business. All we’ve done is automate them.
Course Template:
The course template would look something like this:
Course Title (Training Package Identifier)
Course Description (simple and detailed)
Usual Trainer (can be changed)
Usual Venue (can be changed)
Maximum and Minimum Students
Catering Options
Usual Courseware List
Usual Certificate Template
Usual Confirmation Letter Template
This Course Is Active (Checkbox)
This Course Is Available for Online Bookings (Checkbox)
Usual Assessment or Assignment List
Usual Delivery Method (can be changed)
Nominal Hours Duration
Other fields as required....
Note: you can create a template for each common variation of the above
Scheduling Wizard:
Now use a Wizard to create as many occurrences of the course as you want. these would be the wizard steps:
- Select the course template (from a list of templates like the one above)
- Pick the start date (from a calendar)
- Change the end date (if required - this is initially calculated based on the nominal hours)
- Change the Trainer (if required - using a preset list of options)
- Change the Venue (if required - using a preset list of options)
- Change the Delivery Method (if required - using a preset list of options)
- Change Courseware list (if required - using a preset list of options)
- Change Assessment list (if required - using a preset list of options)
- Change Certificate Template (if required - using a preset list of certificate layouts)
- Change Confirmation Letter (if required - using preset list of templates)
- Make available for student self enrolment (Checkbox)
- Set VET flag (handles data required for AVETMISS reporting)
- Select recurring options (e.g. Run this course every Mon and Wed for the next year)
- Save the Schedule
SAVE ACTION: The action on save will create multiple copies of the course. If step 9 is ticked each copy will be made available on line for students to enrol themselves into and you will automatically receive notification.
Imagine if you had a machine like this for just about every process in your business and for all your regulatory reporting requirements: AVETMISS, AQTF, CRICOS, RAPT, DET, AQF TrainingPackages, - all are constantly changing and updating. The beauty of a wizard approach means that in the uncomfortable event that you have to redo hours of setup work, at least you know that by changing your templates and rerunning the wizard you can be back up and running in no time.