Infor has announced the latest version of its LCMS (Learning Content Management System).
Not so pithily entitled Infor Learning Management Content Creator Cloud Edition they have luckily refrained from giving it an even longer acronym LMCCCE. While Infor products benefit from the sleek design from Hook and Loop it seems a shame that they don’t let the design agency work their magic on product names as well. The solution is available now, just in time for Inforum 2016.
So what is new?
The LCMS is part of the Infor HRM solution. This latest release appears to be part of Infor’s drive towards the cloud. The solution has been updated by Hook &Loop, the New York design agency that enhances the user interface. The LCMS has a new unified experience so that users can move easily between mobile, tablet or desktop. This is achieved by using HTML5 for device wide portability. There is support for multiple languages, localisation and a new unique playback experience.
Dale Kennedy, director, Infor HCM commented: “We live in an increasingly global environment, and the pace of change is fast, with companies developing and releasing more products and more services, and customers becoming just as knowledgeable as the sales teams. The ability to get business-led knowledge out to employees quickly, efficiently, and effectively, is a key differentiator in the marketplace. With this new application, organizations can improve sales and service by ensuring teams are apprised of latest developments, product launches and services, and absorb this knowledge on their device of choice.”
Customers interested in finding out more at Inforum, New York can attend a seminar dedicated to the new release on Sunday 10 July at 14:30 in the afternoon (HCM-804A).
Learning Management can make a difference
For some companies an LMS can make a significant difference. Techtronic Industries is a $4 billion dollar company founded in 1985. They manufacturer high-quality consumer, professional, and industrial products focused on the home improvement, hardware, and construction industries. The company turned to Infor LCMS to solve some of their training issues.
Matt DeFeo, Vice President of Leadership Development, Techtronic Industries Company Ltd commented: “We don’t want to build huge programs; we just need to produce highly effective, impactful development materials. We can now do this by creating, deploying, and tracking everything in one system—all at a reasonable cost.”
The product enables this through a number of features:
- Mobile learning: Delivering content on any device anywhere
- Social learning: The LMS allows the creation of blogs, wikis and the dissemination of videos or podcasts to help the learning experience. The social collaboration tools allow employees to share information and adds an element of informal peer to peer instruction. Companies often have product experts on their staff who can give real life experience and flavour to learning programs.
- Certification and compliance management: This is important for companies that have regulatory requirements who need to track training. The LCMS tracks employee attendance to ensure they go through the appropriate corporate programs both for internal and external requirements.
- Learning portal: The LCMS is not one size fits all. It supports multiple audiences through different activity streams. Thus it is possible to segregate employees, customers and partners within a single installation. This delivers the right content to the right people as quickly as possible.
- Content authoring: This feature enables trainers accelerates the creation of e-learning content. Using pre-loaded HTML5 templates content to be uploaded and disseminated quickly to audiences. Trainers do not need to worry so much about which devices it will be consumed upon.
Ready for the next generation of worker
Another feature of the LCMS that is useful for the next generation of workers is the ecommerce element. A recent round table discussed the prospect of a future transitory workforce. It concluded that companies will need to offer future employees the option of lifelong learning. Where courses are relevant then the training could be delivered free. However if courses are unrelated then it may be possible for employees to gain additional knowledge by paying a fee.
Employees could see this as a perk and employers could offer an allowance towards courses. This is something that could help with talent recruitment. Customers can use the e-commerce feature to charge customers and/or partners. There is support for credit card payments in the solution and with a ready access to content it could turn into an additional revenue stream.
Matt DeFeo alluded to this by saying: “Infor Learning Management has allowed us to directly contribute tens of millions of dollars in revenue to the company, but I personally feel that the single greatest impact is the training department’s ability to help every employee to do their job better and with greater satisfaction.”
Conclusion
It is surprising that this announcement wasn’t held back until next week. However Infor may have larger and more interesting announcements that they are eager to talk about in New York. There is also a slight concern that Infor seems to be adding words to products as they add new features. It will be interesting if the new products announced next week are simplified in language or another mouthful of words.
It is a criticism that we have laid at Infor’s door before. While the brand name Infor does lend itself very well to an LMS solution one cannot help that sometimes they just need to be a little more creative. Given our interest in ancient civilisations the name Serapis comes to mind, the ancient Egyptian god of leaning and knowledge. The choice is obviously not without its issues but its better than LMCCCE in our opinion.
