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Customer Profile

RMIT University is one of Australia’s leading educational institutions. With 57,000 students across five campuses in Australia and one in Vietnam, RMIT offers over 200 programs and works with more than 190 partner institutions around the world. With, a worldwide reputation for excellence in vocational and technical education and research, RMIT offers degrees in engineering, IT and business as well as in popular contemporary fields including life sciences, communications and fashion.

The Challenge

More Effective Training on IT System As a result of extensive business model and enterprise system changes, RMIT needed to provide training in the PeopleSoft-based Academic Management System (AMS) to a large segment of its academic and support staff. The university’s training department knew from experience that while classroom-based training facilitated learning by minimizing workplace distractions, it did not deliver high user or management satisfaction. Plus, it required exhaustive preparation and a lot of time to deliver by staff.

Some learners found class-room learning too slow while others found the pace too fast. There was no measure of competence at the end of training and delivery required more than one instructor to lead the course and provide coaching during exercises. Clearly, RMIT needed to find a better way to achieve competent and confident users of AMS.

The Solution

SupportPoint Online Learning RMIT had previously implemented SupportPoint to provide online help for its SAP users and was very pleased with the user acceptance and the ease and efficiency of content creation and management. After investigating a range of alternatives, they decided to use SupportPoint’s online learning capability to develop and deliver online self-paced training for AMS.

RMIT now delivers the training course and work through graded exercises on a training version of the AMS system using SupportPoint. Users can access training materials, business scenarios and the system-based ‘how to’ instructions. As they work through the course, they answer questions in SupportPoint that allow them to progress from module to module. The questions help the learners to engage with the material, remember what to do and how to do it, and test understanding.

The Solution: Integrating Knowledge Management into Training

SupportPoint is a performance support system that delivers relevant and actionable information about an organization’s specific systems, processes, policies, tasks, and products. With SupportPoint, employees know the right way to work – first time and every time.

SupportPoint improves operational effectiveness by helping employees use systems and apply processes correctly. This ensures higher returns on investment in new systems, greater compliance with policies and procedures, and less rework resulting from confusion about how work is supposed to be done.

SupportPoint also integrates online learning materials and assessments into the performance support (‘how to’) information. In this way, the online learning in SupportPoint allows users to practice completing tasks in the same system used in the job.

RMIT’s training department developed the SupportPoint online training materials and support content from training manuals they had previously produced. Furthermore, RMIT also used SupportPoint to train their content developers how to use SupportPoint Author and for providing guidelines for the development of good online content.

Initially RMIT used SupportPoint to support AMS in the classroom only. With the impressive results achieved, RMIT has now invested in a SupportPoint site license.

The Results: Training Costs Reduced by 50% and More Satisfied Users

Now, AMS users are able to access the ‘how to’ information and online training material in SupportPoint when they are back on the job, further improving accuracy of data entry into the system and reducing the need for ongoing classroom training.

Using SupportPoint for online, self-paced training, RMIT was able to reduce the cost of training dramatically. Each training course now only requires one instructor and the course duration is typically halved. The workload on the instructors has been reduced, creating the opportunity to deliver more courses per week without increasing training facilities or the number of trainers.

Plus, RMIT’s academic and support staff is more satisfied with the new format of enterprise systems training and follow-on support. They can work at their own pace and receive additional coaching through the system if required.

“SupportPoint has enabled us to dramatically reduce the cost of training and improve employee satisfaction with the training provided to them,” said Janette Lenthall, IT HR Manager of RMIT University.

Panviva: Developers of SupportPoint