Comprehensive overview of SuccessFactors LMS Training Planner (Part’1 )

[former_member22780]

Overview

One of the not so commonly used but a very powerful feature of SuccessFactors Learning Management system (LMS) is the training Planner. In my last deployment, the client was looking at options to forecast and manage training costs and have the ability for the training planners to distributing training budget across different departments/organizations. We deployed SuccessFactors training planner for the client.

In the 2 part series -  I will cover the Training planner features and process overview and follow it up with configuration options, notifications and reports.

Capabilities

SuccessFactors training planner at a high level provides the following capabilities

• Allow organizations to define training period for which they want to manage training budgets. E.g. 2017 for a time frame of (01/01/2017 to 12/31/2017) or it could also be 2017 Q1 (Time period of 01/01/2017 to 03/31/2017)


• Allows Organization’s to assign budgets to organization units.


• Allow training manager to distribute budget across different organization units


• Allows to maintain currency conversion so that the planning can be performed in manager currency


• Allows planning of training needs for different departments


• Allows training manager to have visibility to organizational projected training costs Vs available budgets


• Allows employees to request internal and external training requests


• Allows managers to raise group(bulk) department request for training


• Can be integrated to Government reporting (2483 programs)

 

Roles involved in Training Planner

The key players involved in “Training Planner” are:

• Employee
  
  
  
  • Can raise training request
  
  
  • Has visibility into the training request status
  
  
  
  


• Supervisor
  
  
  
  • Can approve and send training request review to the training planner
  
  
  • Can reject a training request of an employees
  
  
  • Can raise bulk organizational request
  
  
  • Can also be assigned the additional role of training manager
  
  
  • Can assign training manager approved training
  
  
  
  


• Training Manager
  
  
  
  • Distribute budget
  
  
  • Visibility into project training costs vs available budget
  
  
  • Approve both internal and external training request
  
  
  
  

The below options are available to perform the above-mentioned actions for each role.

 

 

Training Manager	Supervisor	Employee
·       My Requests ·       My Team's Training Requests ·       My Organization Requests	·  My Requests ·  My Team's Training Requests	·   My Requests

 

 

Process Flow:



 

Detailed overview Training Planner Process Flow:

 

Initial Process:

 



 

Approval Steps

Step 4 – Role: Supervisor

• Has a summary view into total training requests, training request costs and hours


• Can reject or defer courses to future


• Supervisor approve and send for final review by training manager

Supervisor can add bulk request from Catalog or outside

 



 

Step 5 – Role: Training Manager

• Receives notification for the request sent for approval by the training manager


• Training Manager reviews the training request cost Vs allocated/available budget and can approve or reject the training request


• Training Manager can approve bulk request


• Once the review is complete the training manager set the flag “Review completed’ for a particular organizational unit.

 



 

Step 6 – Role: Supervisor

• If it is an internal training, supervisor can assign training to the employee


• If it is an external training, supervisor needs to provide the final approval

 



Employee View

Step 7: Role: Employee

• The employee can see the status of the training request


• Internal training if approved, get a notification and the item is also assigned


• Internal training is rejected the employee gets a notification


• If the training is an external training, the employee sees the approval and can go ahead with the external training

Conclusion

Training Planner is a very comprehensive and robust tool that provides the organizations the ability to manage training budgets. IT involves all key players for training and ensures visibility and comprehensive planning capabilities. In the next of the two-part series, I will go over the configuration, notifications and reporting aspect of the Training Planner

 

 

[Former Member]

Hi,

Nice Presentation, Well Explained.

Regards,

Ravindra

[former_member236937]

Value add to the feature

 

Thank you for sharing 🙂 looking forward for the part-II

 

[former_member23139]

Great blog,

Thanks for sharing,

is there any update on the Publish date of new Part of this article?

[Niladri_B_Nayak]

Excellent. Looking for next part.  Are all of these functionalities out of box or do we have to do some customization?

Regards,

Niladri

[former_member31073]

Hi ,

 

How can we integrate LMS with FI in s4/HANA ? can someone provide any documents related to this question .

[former_member13896]

This is so detailed and clearly explained. Thank you so much!

[MCarpenter]

We have been using Training Planner a couple of years now and would appreciate some improvements to resolve some of our Manager reported pain points. Examples:

• A Manager can create a bulk request without selecting employee names, and submit the request to the Organization Training Manager. If the manager subsequently moves to a different organization, the request moves with the Manager and is no longer editable for the original organization.


• Managers cannot see Organization Training Manager created requests in their "My Team's Requests" dashboard.

Training Planner doesn't seem to be on any product improvement roadmap that we've seen so far.