Accenture: Innovation, growth and business impact through learning outsourcing

Accenture: Innovation, growth and business impact through learning outsourcing

Accenture collaborates with its clients to help them develop and sustain a competent, collaborative and agile workforce capable of driving innovation, competitive differentiation and high performance. One of the largest learning services providers in the world, Accenture provides a full range of innovative learning and knowledge sharing solutions-from content development and delivery to comprehensive outsourcing of the learning function-linked to clear and compelling business results.

Accenture has been privileged to help organizations around the globe achieve high performance through outsourcing solutions that address the learning needs of their workforces. In each case, a key to success was that Accenture and the client forged a collaboration that truly accelerated the value delivered: increasing competitiveness and speed-to-market for new products, moving from a variable to a fixed-cost model for learning, and creating a learning function that supports the most critical strategies of the business.

A recognized market leader, Accenture partners with clients to leverage learning, knowledge sharing, collaboration and other workforce enablement tools and strategies to meet an organization’s most critical business challenges and capitalize on its most promising opportunities. We redefine an organization’s strategic sourcing model for learning with a full range of integrated learning services, innovative assets, deep industry experience and global delivery capabilities. Building upon the consulting experience and knowledge of our experienced resources across industries, each solution is designed to address the specific challenges and opportunities of the client.

Accenture can deliver more efficient learning and workforce enablement solutions but also something equally important-we help organizations create learning outsourcing solutions that redefine what learning is capable of achieving.

Avaya and Accenture pioneer end-to-end enterprise learning outsourcing

When Avaya-a global leader in business communications software, systems and services-embarked on a plan to grow and improve market share with an aggressive schedule of new product launches, a critical success factor was ensuring that its workforce and channel partners were ready to sell and service those products. The spotlight fell upon Avaya's learning organization, Avaya University, as a key to actually delivering on those aggressive goals and, ultimately, to help drive efficiency and high performance for the company.

The challenge was significant. Avaya possessed an extremely talented learning team, but did they have the capacity and scale to transform the learning organization for these new strategic initiatives in less than 12 months, all the while supporting the deployment of new projects critical to Avaya's future? According to Suellen Roth, vice
president of Global Workforce Diversity, Employee Excellence, Global Policy and Avaya University, a number of capabilities essential to a high-performance learning organization were not in place. "We lacked the infrastructure you need to run a world-class learning organization and, as such, we suspected we were spending too much to produce too little impact," Roth said.

To remedy the situation, Avaya had several options. It could augment the capabilities of its learning organization
by developing and hiring talent; yet this long-term strategy would not help meet its immediate marketplace challenges. It could outsource parts of its learning infrastructure such as the learning management system and administration responsibilities; however, although such a plan might deliver incremental cost savings, it would not actually increase the competency and productivity of the training organization and enable it to achieve the required business results.

Instead, Avaya made a bold move. In November 2001 it outsourced its entire enterprise learning function to
Accenture, based on Accenture’s global scale and expertise, and its proven track record in delivering enterprise-wide learning solutions that drive business performance and growth. The scope of the learning outsourcing agreement included the development and delivery of all product and service training for employees, customers and business partners in more than 90 countries, as well as employee development and skills development training.

To support Avaya's business priorities from a learning perspective, Accenture planned to deploy its integrated design, development and delivery processes, and roll out its patent-pending business interlock methods for aligning learning activities with Avaya's business strategy.

In less than four months, Accenture put in place both content and structure to enable learning solutions to Avaya
employees; in six months, end-to-end learning services were available to more than 50,000 learners across the
globe, including employees, business partners and customers. Over the course of the first twelve months, as Avaya deployed the most new products in its history, the sales, service and channel workforces were prepared to help the company drive toward high performance.

Under the management of Accenture, Avaya University has become a premier global example of how learning can drive high performance for organizations today. In the first year of the outsourcing arrangement, Avaya University successfully supported the largest release of new communications products in Avaya’s history, with learning costs lower than pre-outsourcing levels.

A sample of results achieved through the learning outsourcing relationship:

Avaya University now delivers more training per employee with a reduction in overall learning investment, compared to its pre-outsourcing organization.
81 percent of Avaya's available courses can now be accessed electronically, compared with 23-percent availability before outsourcing.
In some cases, time to proficiency has been accelerated by 60 percent for customers, channel partners and employees, returning 35,000 workdays to the corporation and channel partners.
To support revenue growth in the IP telephony space, Avaya University created a "Fast Track" learning program in the Caribbean and Latin Americas region to support the rapid development of a select group of pre-sales and systems engineers. The program helped these individuals produce a 35 percent increase in revenues in six months.
To enable the Avaya sales force to sell total solutions to customers, rather than individual products, Avaya University created a sales certification program to build core sales competencies and to establish a standardized sales discipline and methodology. The program helped to increase average sales funnel size by 13 percent, and close rates by 6 percent in measured control groups.

With the help of Accenture, Avaya continues to push itself to achieve high performance through learning. As Avaya CEO Donald Petersen notes, "One of the things that sets Avaya apart is the way we have built into our operating structure the simple but important truth that it is our people who make it possible for the company to execute strategy, serve customers and grow profitable revenue. We created Avaya University with Accenture for the explicit purpose of enabling our people to continuously execute toward business strategy. The goals of Avaya University are simply another manifestation of the company's goals. And, as our metrics program shows, because learning is closely aligned with our business, we have been extremely successful at producing measurable business benefits based on our world-class learning and workforce enablement programs."