Our clients tell us that one of the most common and time consuming activities they have to perform every day is ‘Scheduling’. Setting up course schedules need not be a mammoth task, in fact advanced scheduling for one or more years is one of the easiest ways to minimise time and effort. It also provides options and alternatives for your clients. Let’s say I’m the HR Administrator for one of your client organisations. I have to look after the capabilities and skills of my employees and make sure they get the right training to meet their career goals. So I arrive at your website (as my preferred RTO and view the courses that you’ve made available to me. I can browse your course catalogues and enrol my employees into your courses. I’ve got 100 employees who need to be booked into a variety of your courses at different times of the year. Once I book them I would like a confirmation letter and a tax invoice for each enrolment. What would REALLY help me is to be able to see all your courses throughout the year.
Ok, now let’s say I’m a contract trainer. I have to deliver your courses and I need information from you. I need to know what course(s) I’m delivering throughout the year, who will be attending, where the course will be held, what courseware will be used and how to get hold of it, and how I’m going to enter course and assessment results. What I would REALLY like is a site where I can just log in and find all this information whenever I need.
Now let’s say I’m the person who provides all the catering for lunches and tea breaks at your training college. What I REALLY need is a report that can be emailed to me at least a week in advance telling me how many students and staff I need to cater for. I also need to know about any special dietary requirements.
| Well, a good resource planning tool makes all that possible and more. These services can be made available to your clients and suppliers as long as you have a good scheduling tool and use it diligently and thoughtfully. |
So what does this tool look like?
First you would use a course template as discussed in the last article (Part 2). The template enables you to schedule courses easily by retaining much of the information as ‘Default Settings’. For example if 90% of your courses run at the same Venue and Location then you should be able to set these in the template once and change only when necessary. That’s what a default setting does. Next we use a Wizard (also discussed in the last article – Part 2) to schedule the big ticket items that your clients will need to make decisions; where, when, and how much. The reason for separating these big ticket items is so you can control what information your clients can access vs. what information your staff and suppliers can access. For example; the caterer needs to know the exact numbers for each meal, but the client really only needs to know that meals are provided.
Next, you need to allocate resources to the course that provide information for your own staff and trainers. These can be set up as Activities. The beauty of using an Activity for this purpose is that firstly, you can assign as many activities as you need for each course, secondly they don’t have to be specific, and thirdly you can save them as templates and reuse the same set of activities whenever you run this course in future. Activities can be assigned to any staff member or trainer and can take place in any venue along with a list of any additional training resources.
In Summary:
The schedule and resource plan together offer many advantages:
- Long term planning leads to better client options and hence profits for your RTO
- Once a good schedule is in place all stakeholders can get the information that’s relevant to them as and when they need it. You can have the system PUSH it to them using emails and reminders, or you can allow them to PULL it from the system via a team portal.
- Costed resources mean that you get costings as a by-product of scheduling – your finance officer will be happy with this one. Without any additional effort on your part, you can easily find out your revenue and cost position by combining an enrolment and resource report. And from that you can calculate your pre-tax profit and loss.
- Activities allow you to create any number of course or non-course related tasks. So if you wanted to run a “maintenance and repair” program on all your classrooms you could use Activities that affect ALL courses during that period. Or you could use an Activity to allocate a Trainer and a Classroom to deliver one particular course.
- Activities work much like Appointments in Microsoft Outlook. And even more importantly they can be exported to Microsoft Outlook as group or individual calendars. This allows staff to integrate local calendars with their TMS calendars.
How They All Connect:
- Course Template
- Use to create multiple Course Schedules
- Add any number of course or non-course activities and save the set as a template for reuse
- Trainers / Staff
- Venue
- Catering
- Equipment
- Courseware
- Etc…