It is not breaking news that training budgets are tight at the moment.  A recent report* revealed that three out of five L&D Managers said that their training budgets are the first to be cut in economically challenging times. With this in mind, it is crucial to ensure that training budgets stretch as far as possible and provide a real and significant ROI.

Supply management provides a cost effective solution for delivering the learning and development which your organisation requires without busting your budget. Using the services of a learning supply management specialist will save you time and money and ensure that you get the best results from your investment in training.

Supply management is becoming increasingly popular within businesses. This is due to the immense buying power that specialist providers have in the market. When it comes to training, it makes sense to take advantage of the huge network of training suppliers that supply management companies have access to.

Due to the relationships that have been built over the years with the top training organisations, training supply management specialists can negotiate great rates on a range of training particularly IT software applications such as Adobe, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Technical, Novell, Oracle, PRINCE2, Red Hat, Sun and VMware and many others.

Organisations can leverage the buying power of supply management companies to deliver their training requirements at greatly reduced rates. Also, a considerable amount of time can be saved by dealing with just one company that can research and identify your ideal training provider, negotiate rates and manage the whole process on your behalf.

Apart from the obvious financial benefits of supply management, there is also a quality assurance advantage. Training providers are rigorously vetted and service level agreements are put in place to ensure that any training delivery meets expectations and produces the required results.

Monitoring the process from the initial stages of planning through implementation to evaluating the effectiveness of the training, supply management can reduce the burden placed on HR and L&D professionals to continually demonstrate ROI to senior leaders. Thorough reporting processes ensure that organisations have facts and figures about attendance, training progress and performance at their fingertips in order to justify the budget spend.

So if you need to tighten your budget, workload, quality of training and reporting in 2012, then a supply management service could be just what you need.

* Source: HRZone http://www.hrzone.co.uk/topic/managing-people/training-budgets-first-be-cut-due-unclear-business-value/117821