npower reduces SAP training costs by £3 million with Assima
How leading UK energy company achieves major training cost savings; reduces staff onboarding from 33 days to 18 days; and enhances training quality by leveraging Assima’s cloning solution.
In order to enable the smart meter rollout across the country, and as part of the European measures to upgrade the United Kingdom’s energy supply and tackle climate change, npower made the move from several critical enterprise applications to one; SAP.
With 4,500 people needing to be trained on the new system as quickly and efficiently as possible, including key customer-facing teams within the contact centre, npower’s current training methodology was not sufficient. They knew their current delivery methods were outdated and costly, and did not have a digital learning capability or a functional LMS in place.
The traditional training client they did have was costing millions to maintain and required a team of more than 140 for delivery.
Andy Hurren, Head of Learning at npower, used the Assima Training Suite (ATS) to clone their core SAP applications and build training modules to guide end-users through key tasks and processes.
The training modules looked and felt exactly the same as the live SAP application which meant the team members could learn by doing. As the clones did not need maintaining with live data from the SAP systems it meant training materials could quickly and dynamically reflect any changes in the live system.
“Here was a system that would allow me to train new staff on SAP without the astronomical cost of building and maintaining a SAP training client. Assima really was the answer to our prayers,” commented Andy.
npower found that the adoption of a blended learning approach meant they could achieve a volume rollout, within a short timescale, whenever they needed to ramp up their recruitment activity.
“The ease of ongoing maintenance and the value of lessons being available 24/7 throughout the training period and during Business as Usual has saved a lot of time and made considerable savings compared to the old way of training where classes and [training environment] refreshes had to be run frequently, with a training environment always available”, said Andy.
The new training has been implemented for all induction training and also to up-skill existing employees moving into new areas. In Domestic Customer Service alone, this translates to over 2,000 people and the total number of people trained is close to 4,500.
The most notable results npower has achieved by using Assima are:
- £3 million has been saved by implementing the Assima Training Suite as opposed to developing a SAP training client and maintaining it over three years.
- The on-boarding times for new contact centre staff has decreased from 33 days with traditional classroom training to just 18 days with blended training from Assima, nearly a 50% reduction.
- The user experience and training retention has increased dramatically. People can practice what they learn in the classroom, in a safe environment that looks exactly the same as the live system. This increases confidence and makes employees remember what they have learned much more effectively.
- There has been an 80% reduction in staffing requirements for new projects.
Visitors to LEARNING LIVE can join Assima and Andy Hurren on Thursday September 7th at 11.30am to hear Andy share his insights about how the Assima software has revolutionised npower’s training approach. Exclusively designed for heads of learning, talent and development, LEARNING LIVE 2017 is dedicated to tackling today’s strategic challenges in workplace learning. LEARNING LIVE is free to attend, at the discretion of the organisers.