Any corporation, big or small, knows about emerging influence of SaaS on enterprise software. Most functional areas have already permanently replaced traditional solutions with more seamless SaaS solutions. Whether an economy is facing adversity or prosperity, it is always advantageous to control your costs while moving on to more efficient, agile, and scalable opportunities.
Training and development of employees are one of the costliest possessions for the enterprise. They cannot be given up or even scaled down. Companies need to keep providing relevant and up to date training in order to retain top-tier employees: The people who reflect a brand's identity and pave the road for achievements.
Human Resources has been more unwilling about changing over to SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) LMS solutions when compared to other departments. Although more companies, specifically small and medium-sized, are now making the move, HR has always been tardy to realize the accessibility, quality learning experience, faster deployment, and easy upgrade ability these solutions offer. By the virtue of being SaaS, they are also more cost effective. We have listed down 10 reasons why a SaaS (cloud-based) LMS software is more economical than the traditional:
1. Negligible Hardware Costs
It eliminates the need of purchasing, upgrading and maintaining servers installed on your premises. Associating with a SaaS vendor essentially means that you will be using their software solutions on their servers. All you need for access, virtually on any device, is a good internet connection.
2. Reduced In-house Support
Hiring expensive IT support staff, like database administrators (or DBAs), is in the past now. There are already tons of well-understood benefits of strategically outsourcing IT staff to 3rd party service providers. A smaller team working on scalable and easy-to-manage software sinks your operating costs much lower.
3. Software Related Costs are Broken Down
With no responsibility of maintaining servers, there are no operating systems to be installed or managed. Your company will not have to go through the hassles of licensing or additional costs of developing in-house software. Instead, the company pays for subscription of vendor’s software, that are mostly scaled up specifically for the organization.
This turns the capital investment of having an LMS to operating expense and provides opportunities for the business to include more practical functions with their initial investment.
4. Improved Cross-departmental Cooperation
If you read almost any book about business operations and/or case studies about why some of the biggest players of the last century are now struggling for market share, you will know that silos and ineffective communication have been the biggest reason for a business's demise.
By facilitating a better understanding related to the basic functionality of each department, SaaS LMSs promote better cooperation on-demand and aid in dropping the costs of bringing different departments together.
5. Cost of Technical Scalability is Removed
SaaS solutions are generally built on scalable and redundant cloud services which can be easily used to scale the software up and down based on individual demand. It is also possible to set up notifications when important changes occur with enterprise-wide monitoring. So, concepts like downtime, maximum concurrent users, and off-site backups are non-existent.
6. Reduced TCO and Improved ROI
The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) significantly drops with the almost negligible responsibility of the infrastructure. Because of this, the returns on investment numbers reflect a higher efficiency of Human Resources.
7. Branding of Solution
The expense of customizing, adapting, and branding your LMS is taken care of by the vendor. Carefully selecting a vendor will result in a long and prosperous relationship where the solution provided will likely reach unexpected potentials and reveal new areas where software can further benefit the business.
8. Access to Refined Apps
A vendor-hosted SaaS LMS will provide you with apps that have been proven to be successful. More considerably, such vendors have access to a pool of third-party or self-developed apps and businesses can choose the ones that suit their needs best.
The bothersome negotiations involved with integration of third party software solutions are transferred to the vendor and hence, the cost of testing and piloting any new applications automatically becomes null.
9. Training and Development can Focus on Relevant Areas
A company considering a SaaS LMS definitely does not specialize in IT. And, for such organizations, creating and updating training programs unrelated to functional areas responsible for generating business can be bothersome and frustrating.
SaaS LMS takes away the cost of training the system administrators and keeping their skills current. Essentially, it supports and further enables organizations to focus on their core business.
10. Shared Learning
The expense of sourcing new and up-to-date information decreases considerably as the users can overtake the role of teaching something they know because of the flexibility of the system.
SaaS providers have entire teams of IT professionals and can take care of almost all the hassles related to the technology for you. Because you're not spending your time and resources on managing and implementing the LMS, you're free to expand your organization's learning objectives. Undeniably, by outsourcing LMS, a company can save valuable time and money – two of the most important resources.
