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TECHNOLOGY EXCHANGE
General Physics Chooses Oracle iLearning
over other major LMS Vendors
Establishing our portal with Oracle iLearning expands our ability to deliver over 1,400 technical training lessons to energy companies of all sizes. Web-based courses are extremely popular because they can be accessed quickly and easily, and are a cost-effective approach for training a dispersed workforce."
--Russ Garrity, Director of GP Energy Services
A subsidiary of GP Strategies Corporation, General Physics is one of the world's largest workforce development companies, with more than 1,600 professionals. As a global leader in technical and soft skills training, GP develops training programs for the specific needs of clients by focusing on people, processes, and technology. By objectively analyzing production and business processes, GP can determine where the opportunities for workforce development reside and how best to achieve measurable improvement in an organization's performance, cost management and compliance objectives
General Physics has teamed up with Oracle iLearning to provide a web- based training portal for power plant personnel of all energy companies. This effective approach enables employees to participate in learning whenever and wherever possible. Oracle iLearning, a learning management system (LMS) that offers Internet-based learning solutions, provides the platform and the portal, while General Physics provides the technical content. Over 1,400 lessons have been integrated into this one training portal from which personnel can access any or every lesson, while supervisors manage and track their success.
This outsourced "portal" solution makes top quality training courses available to power generation facilities of every type and size. The portal enables administrators to assign, evaluate, and track both ''knowledge-based'' and ''hands-on''' qualification tasks, while permitting supervisors to easily manage and track the success of their employees. Courses cover the subject areas of Plant Operations, Mechanical Maintenance, I&C, Electrical Maintenance, Combined Cycle Fundamentals, OSHA, and Environmental Compliance.
- Remove administration system and course content from servers at client sites
- Create a portal for access to training material, where upgrades are made directly on the portal system, allowing customers to access information immediately
- Make on-line chat rooms and forums available for personnel to interact with peers and mentors
- Solution must be compatible with any operating system, and all content must be accessible through a web browser
- Company must have the option to customize their training site with its own "look and feel”
Why Oracle?
"We were looking to train a dispersed workforce, and were having some difficulties with sending CBT upgrades to our customers, as well as dealing with operating system compatibility problems," stated Russ Garrity, Director of GP Energy Services. "We had developed an in-house LMS where we let clients customize their own environment, then one day you wake up and realize that you've got thousands of users all over the world using your product and it's very difficult to maintain that business. We needed to find a product that would help us deal with upgrades and multiple operating systems in the field, as well as provide a consolidated solution to our customer base."
"Another big benefit was the pricing model for Oracle iLearning. Most competitors wanted an up-front fee, where the Oracle pricing was a per-person deal. Oracle University consulting services did an excellent job of proactively trying to solve our business problems without telling us we needed to buy a piece of software for $50,000 or $100,000. The pricing model, consulting services, and hosted component made Oracle iLearning the top choice over other major LMS vendors."
After the first phase is completed, General Physics plans to expand the portal to serve all power industry customers, adding 10,000 new learners. Longer-term, they will continue to grow the total number of learners by converting customers in other market sectors, such as environmental, financial, manufacturing and process industries.
For more information on this project and for Oracle iLearning:
http://www.oracle.com/customers/profiles/PROFILE8214.HTML
http://www.oracle.com/applications/human_resources/index.html?learning.html