ROI – Return on Investment

This ROI is offered with caveats that this is not a promise you will get the same results.  

We estimate 2-5 hours of labor savings per administrator per week and 2-4 hours labor savings per month per supervisor even if they never touch the system through automated reporting. Given 1 administrator and 10 supervisors, over the course of a work year and a 2 week vacation, this is 340 hours of increased productivity. At a labor and burden rate of $50/hour, this is a $17K savings and an ROI in 3 months while also increasing the quality of work and enhancing peace of mind in data and processes you can trust. As you scale to more administrators and supervisors, the ROI often is realized in days. 

ROI should also seek to ask other questions. Here are a few questions we ask which only you can answer. 

What is the value of better decisions?
What sort of problems will a well designed training tracking solution avoid? 

Here are other things to consider for an ROI all of which ABILITYTRACKER can effectively address:

• When an audit comes along, you want to be able to control the scope of what data they will audit which will save them time as well and limit their ability to disrupt your day to day work. 
• If using a home-grown system, someone has to support and enhance the system. Often this is done by an IT resource on loan, who moves onto other projects or other companies. This can complicate and make expensive maintenance and support of the application as the march of time of changing technology, changing personnel and changing needs occurs. 
• Poor training tracking can lead to OSHA findings and fines, significantly increase the risk being managed, and give validation to claims someone was not trained should some legal dispute occur. In contrast, clean training tracking data can be a first line of defence, particularly if there are well designed controls in how data is added or changed with fill auditing in human readable language. 

On a Personal Note

The prevention of workplace accidents is serious business. Training is the best way to prepare the worker. The problem though is often times an organization does not don’t know what it doesn’t know,  when it needs to know it. 

We often see the training function handcuffed unable to mandate training but still mandated to use an LMS that does not manage all the training tracking needs of the organization. ABILITYTRACKER can address both. 

Whatever your situation, you can and should document your efforts to communicate training requirements. ABILITYTRACKER makes this easy with self-service tools, custom reports and both on-demand and scheduled data distribution to users or other systems. Each step in the training tracking data management journey is documented and auditable. 

ABILITYTRACKER can help defend and protect the efforts of the training team. You may not be able to mandate training, but you will be able to document your efforts to communicate and engage training needs to front line managers and workers. When a problem gets hot and there is finger pointing, when you use ABILITYTRACKER properly, you will be part of the solution, while raising the value and visibility of the training function to leadership through the quality and completeness of the data. Likewise, the complete reporting and rich automations, will make it a lot easier to show a measured increase in required training compliance and/or where there are gaps to fill. 

It is not uncommon to show very poor if not problematic compliance percentages once ABILITYTRACKER is implemented. It is very common that once implemented, compliance percentages becomes a badge of pride. 

Ultimately, we all want the worker to be well prepared for their jobs and at the end of the day be able to go home to their loved ones. ABILITYTRACKER can play a significant part in helping execute to this mission through best-in-class training tracking data management. 

Common Questions 

What’s the difference between AbilityTracker and an LMS? 

LMS apps vary. Some virtualize what occurs in the classroom and manage a learning experience that would occur over the course of an academic semester. Some manage only on-line training. Some do on-line training and manage registrations into classroom or virtual training. Only the very specialized apps can track external training, on-the-job training and can act as a source of truth of training data. Even then, they often impose data entry protocols that are labor intensive and clumsy. 

In our experience, not all training that occurs towards a targeted audience can be managed in an LMS, and that can become a big problem when that data has to be tracked. Related is the organization who has different LMS systems, so trying to get a single source of truth about training can be painful to impossible. 

ABILITYTRACKER is a specialized training tracking application. It has similarities to what an administrator might do in an LMS except ABILITYTRACKER does not care what you want to track and where the training took place. The training does not have to originate from the LMS which is a constraint in many LMS systems. ABILITYTRACK has tools to make ingestion of external data easy an automatic and batch entry tools that make it super easy, super fast and super fun, particularly once one realizes the better state of data management ABILITYTRACKER delivers. 

Can I deliver on-line training or registration services to users?

No, that is not the purpose of ABILITYTRACKER; however, there is a clear upgrade path to support these services upgrading from ABILITYTRACKER to ABILITYLMS. You can of course use any LMS, although we are a little biased that ours is the best. 

 Can I schedule Reports

Yes. ABILITYTRACKER includes a user friendly and powerful tool to create custom reports. Reports you build can be scheduled for automatic delivery at a frequency and to an audience of your choice. For example, consider a Monday Report that goes out to a manager of all training due and that took place in a desired reporting period. 

Does unlimited users mean unlimited users?

Yes. There is no limit to the number of users in the database, whether active or inactive. The only limit is the number of active login sessions at one time which is set for 1000 as a base starting rate. 

To better understand our licensing metaphor, think of driving a car to your favorite store with 1000 parking spaces. When the car is parked, it occupies a parking space reducing the number of parking spaces by one. When the car leaves, the number of parking spaces increases by one. 

Now we can increase the number of active logins by adding more compute capacity. This is when you might get into an additional expense. Given an email blast to a population and a 20% click through rate, we estimate this model is suitable to an audience of 5000 users and much larger if you do not do email blasts as there is no server stampede effect to manage. 

Can I build courses with AbilityTracker 

No. AbilityTracker is a tool to track training. If you want to build courses, you can upgrade to AbilityLMS which has a terrific course builder tool or user any 3rd party tool to create courses. 

What do I get when I subscribe?

AbilityTracker is delivered as a cloud based solution where each client has their own instance of the system. 

By own instance, each client has their own web server, their own disk space for their storage, and their own dedicated database. Each client is essentially their own silo system where it is technically impossible for any sort of data co-mingling of other clients. . 

Each client also has a testing system that can be used for training and experimenting with features. All updates are always pre-staged to the testing system. 

In essence, when you subscribe to AbilityTracker, we are a single source provider of all aspects of implementing, training and supporting AbilityTracker. Your IT department may want to vet us for security, infrastructure and coding / life cycle standards, which is a discussion we always welcome; however, we are your sole source for IT support for anything related to AbilityTracker operation. We prefer to deal directly with the user with the support need and not an IT support help desk.  This insures needs are meet faster by someone who is also a subject matter expert. It also tells us how we are doing and where we can improve. Client help desk teams tend to like not having to support an application they do now know too! 

How does getting data from my LMS into AbilityTracker work

AbilityTracker can ingest files of people, courses, classes, history, assignments and more. We import flat, delimited files with a simple tool to map to your incoming columns to corresponding columns in the database. When setting up imports, you will work with a specialists who will do the initial set-up for you. Imports can done manually or per a schedule. 

ABILITYTRACKER also supports data ingestion via a restful APIs. We engage with the client developer directly to assist in API calls as there tends to not be a one-size fits all API, and we have different APIs which may allign better for a need as well as the ability to customize APIs for specialized needs.  

Can I send data back to my LMS or to some other system?

Yes. Data can always be manually exported, or exported on a schedule. When using the report builder, the custom report can also accessed via a restful API. 

Next Steps

We invite you to watch the video for an introduction to AbilityTracker. If after watching the video you would like to do a live-demo with an AbilityTracker specialist, click the Free Trial button and submit the form. We’d love to spend time with you to help you make an informed decision about AbilityTracker