Deloitte cuts training and support costs

with LearningGuide

Deloitte is a global leader in business consultancy, serving more than one-half of the world's largest companies, employing 95,000 people in 140 countries that provide services from advising on e-business strategy to investment and tax matters. Its fee income for the year was $16 billion. In the Netherlands, Deloitte employs 6,000 people and is a highly recognised business services brand.

Deloitte Netherlands has used LearningGuide for several years to resolve desktop user support and learning queries across its 6,000-strong workforce – helping to reduce local training and helpdesk support costs for its Microsoft Office users. Providing on line workplace support for desktop tasks was important because Deloitte wanted to remove its non-technical helpdesk support for users at each local Deloitte office throughout the country.

In 2004, when Deloitte upgraded its global templates and forms library to reflect a new company identity it needed to ensure that workers’ productivity was maintained and that users could quickly resolve day-to-day queries. Deloitte’s standard user desktop was also expanded to include the Microsoft Visio and Project applications and its Microsoft Office software was upgraded to the latest version, Microsoft Office 2003.

Deloitte’s use of Microsoft Office, as with many large enterprises, penetrates almost every workflow process and is entwined in a huge array of working practices. A workplace performance system, used to deliver and maintain desktop skills, has become an essential requirement for the company.

Migrations and developments to users’ standard desktops requires the necessary support so that the use of documents, templates, forms and collaboration between teams continues without affecting productivity and so that users are able to fully utilise new functionality as quickly as possible.

Fast adoption of new skills and keeping the workforce effective is particularly important for Deloitte because the workforce comprises a very high proportion of directly billable professionals, mostly billed by the hour. Deloitte has a requirement to recruit the best people and develop and maintain their skills to a very high level, yet justifying ‘non-billable’ time spent taking training courses is a considerable factor when faced with rolling out new programs.

LearningGuide offers Deloitte a permanent learning solution. Deloitte’s LearningGuide is updated regularly, for example, with new support objects and templates. Users are confident that they can quickly find the correct and most up to date document or template in their LearningGuide and no longer need non-technical desktop support. In this respect Deloitte has almost completely removed a huge cost from its business.

The LearningGuide solution is also highly scalable. As new recruits enter the workforce, LearningGuide provides a considerable level of learning and support that would otherwise have involved attending courses and calling the helpdesk,

LearningGuide is supporting Deloitte’s workforce, in the workplace via the intranet and across its large user base of remote staff working at client sites.

The benefits to Deloitte are substantial. Considerable disruption to billable revenues caused by attending training is being avoided. The dip in productivity usually associated with new, large upgrades in desktop applications is being reduced. The cost of LearningGuide has saved Deloitte huge sums in the cost of computer- and classroom-based training courses and continues to do so.

Deloitte cuts training and support costs with LearningGuide 101Kb