Plan – delivering targeted training to enhance business performance

Silver Lining provides a unique combination of individual planning - identifying the training requirements for each member of staff - and intelligent scheduling that means you make best use of your training resources.

Learning and development professionals - and line managers - know that blanket approaches to training are far from perfect. They consume vast amounts of time, some people receive repeat training they don't need and others don't receive the extra support they require.

But the alternative - targeted training for every member of staff - has always seemed a logistical impossibility. Not any more.

Silver Lining enables you to translate the detailed analysis of skills needs into targeted and actionable training plans for individuals and teams: what training is required by what date and for how many people. Then, by integrating Silver Lining into your Workforce Management system, you can schedule every aspect, maximising the use of available resources and minimising the administrative effort.

Once integrated, Silver Lining's unique algorithms scan potential Service Level impact, agent, trainer and training room availability to find the optimal times to deliver training with minimal disruption to operations and rapidly inserts them into the WFM schedule. This enables you to:

• deliver training at quiet times - or provide access to an online course and give people a specific time-window (a week, two weeks etc) in which to complete it
• identify the most suitable time and location for group training - across different departments or business units
• book rooms and trainers
• book times in individual diaries - so managers know when their staff will be engaged on training
• reschedule courses for those who missed them

The result? Training is optimised around service levels, training resources, the business and your people's real needs. That means learners get the training they require at a time they can concentrate on it, and higher skilled people don't waste time on training they don't need. What's more, the planning team spend less time on manual, repetitive work and more time working with the learning and development teams to improve training and planning. Finally, learning and development teams spend less time on logistics and more time on improving training programmes.

Analyse - generate unprecedented insight into what skills each member of staff or each team has, and what skills drive improved performance.

Evaluate - use Silver Lining to understand the existing skill levels of each member of your team quickly, consistently and efficiently.

Manage - actively monitor outcomes of training, and give staff the tools they need to manage their own development.

Optimise - ensure the right employees take on the right tasks at the right time, making best use of their skills.

Connect - link your new understanding of your people into every system and aspect of your operations - driving performance improvement.

"I had a team of 9 people completely dedicated to planning training on a rolling cycle, it would take them two weeks to do all of the planning training for the next month, and then then there would be re-work and mop-ups etc. The training planning that we've just done [with the Silver Lining Solution] in the last month was completed in a day or two. It really is a big, big difference for us.

We used to have people dedicated to training planning because it was so manual. We are now able to roll this out so that anyone who does forecasting or scheduling can do this work. It doesn't have to be a dedicated person, so in terms of utilising the resource we have inside the scheduling and planning team it's a real bonus."