QA brings suppliers together to create comprehensive managed vendor solution
QA has further enhanced its Global Reach supplier management programme to remove both risk and administrative pain from the training procurement process.
Following the merger in September 2008 of QA-IQ and Xpertise, the partnership programme now includes over 150 approved suppliers providing geographic reach and subject matter experts across a wide range of specialist areas and business sectors.
Ben Pike, Managing Director of Managed Learning Services at QA explains "We’re able to combine our experience of the training industry with the purchasing power of an annual global spend of over £17m. This enables our customers to achieve cost savings of up to 60% while still benefiting from learning programmes we have aligned to their business needs. Our experience has shown that our customers want more than a brokerage service providing standard training courses from the lowest cost provider, and therefore our Global Reach supplier programme is built on partnership, innovation and delivery excellence.”
Nigel Murphy, Learning Consultant at Experian, has already seen benefits from this approach, “As a large company with a diverse range of staff we’ve found that no single supplier can meet all our training needs. Like many companies we wanted to make sure that we were getting good value from our training budgets, without compromising on the development of our people. Through QA’s managed service we we’ve been able to benefit from the services of a wide range of suppliers, confident that they fit in to the strategic development of our programme.”
QA used this approach to develop Experian’s Offshoring training programme which helped Experian managers prepare to work using an offshoring approach and addressed gaps in cultural awareness as well as practical management skills. Murphy continues, “QA has risen to the challenge of meeting our changing business needs by combining their own expertise with that of carefully selected partners.”
Communicaid, a leading language and cultural training business worked with QA to support the Experian programme. Communicaid Marketing Director, Declan Mulkeen, comments, “QA has brought us into contact with new customers and is working in genuine partnership with us to deliver the right solution to their customers. They understand how to deliver effective training programmes and we were pleased to work in partnership with them to develop and deliver this programme for Experian.”
Pike concludes, “When customers select a supplier for their training programmes they want to be sure they’re dealing with a company that can support their business requirements. They want to be confident that the supplier will still be in business when the training needs to be delivered and, increasingly, they need to make their budget go further. We’ve responded to this by creating a our Global Reach supplier programme that will give our clients complete confidence that we’ll deliver them effective learning programmes that align to business needs in today’s changing market.”