Gevity HR Cuts The Cost of Training

The Situation:

Cut the cost of training on the company's enterprise resource planning software.

The Solution:

Gevity HR (pronounced je'-vi-tee), a Bradenton, FL-based human resources outsourcing firm, was spending a fortune bringing managers back to headquarters for monthly software training sessions. The company cut travel costs by two-thirds by switching to a collaborative Web conferencing service, but managers soon realized they could save even more. By bringing Web conferencing technology in house, the company has cut costs while also improving the effectiveness of its training programs.

Gevity HR handles payroll processing for more than 8,000 companies in the Southeast. The firm runs a suite of Oracle software including Oracle Payroll - the main application in use - as well as Oracle Financials, Oracle HR and the Oracle Portal.

According to Mark Zimmerman, Gevity HR's senior director of information technology, teaching salespeople and clients how to use Oracle was expensive. "We brought operations managers to headquarters for a monthly refresher course and to train them to use new features," Zimmerman explains. "To do this, we had to fly in and house 30 operations managers for two to three days a month. When I calculated the cash outlay for these sessions, it came to about $15,000."

Zimmerman says there were also hidden costs such as the work time lost by the managers as well as quality-of-life issues for those having to travel several days each month.

The first step Gevity HR took in getting a handle on these expenses was to use a Web conferencing service to host training sessions. "We saved two-thirds of the cash outlay of a traditional meeting at our headquarters," Zimmerman says.

Using the service also saved the work time forfeited to travel, but it wasn't long before the fees for the Web conferencing service began to add up. "The application service provider was costing us $5,000 per month on an ongoing basis," Zimmerman explains.

To cut costs even further, Gevity HR switched to WebDemo, an internally hosted Web conferencing tool from Tucson, AZ-based Linktivity. This real-time conferencing tool lets users host presentations and conduct meetings over the Web. The WebDemo server connects users together while the client, written in Java, is dynamically downloaded on users' machines.

To host a meeting, a user logs into the WebDemo server and enters the information needed to hold a meeting, including the schedule and user access requirements. Once a meeting is scheduled, the server sends out e-mail messages inviting users to join. Users invited to join a meeting direct their browsers or other Java-enabled viewers to the WebDemo server, where they are connected to the meeting. Control of a WebDemo conference can be passed to any participant, and any one participant's desktop can be shared among all participants. The system also supports instant messaging within a conference.

The server can integrate with external databases to draw out information such as user names and e-mail addresses. Linktivity has an API that lets developers integrate WebDemo with their own applications.

WebDemo pricing ranges from $1,199 for five seats up to $14,999 for 100 seats. Pricing is independent of usage. The Linktivity approach let Gevity HR cut service costs related to bandwidth from the training budget. WebDemo's server requirements are relatively modest. An 800 Mhz Pentium III with at least 512 MB of memory is needed to support up to 25 users.

According to Linktivity, five or 10 concurrent users can be supported on as little bandwidth as 256 kilobits per second (equal to two ISDN lines or a low-end digital subscriber line). Those with more than 25 users need a T1 line or equivalent (about 1.5 megabits per second). If a WebDemo server is kept behind a firewall, network administrators have to open up TCP/IP port 80 to the Internet.

The Results:

"Overall, we save between $1,600 and $4,000 per month using WebDemo versus [our former] Web conferencing service provider," says Zimmerman.

Eliminating the incremental costs of running conferences also encouraged the use of the software for other tasks. "Besides training operations managers, we also use WebDemo to demonstrate software under development to regional vice presidents to get their input. The software lets us show projects in development and get feedback from users."

Zimmerman says that the WebDemo software is also used to improve Gevity HR's sales pitch. "Salespeople can use the software to demonstrate to the customer how our payroll system works," he explains. "Instead of relying on brochures, we can show the software in action, even without a salesperson on site. After making the sale, the salesperson can use WebDemo to show the customer how to use the software."

Because there is no cost penalty to running additional training sessions, Gevity HR has reduced the number of participants in each training session to allow for more interaction.

"We have a 25-seat license for WebDemo, but we found that training sessions went smoother with just five users at a time," says Zimmerman. "Reducing the number of participants makes the training more personalized and effective, and it also frees up the extra seats for other training sessions or sales support sessions running in parallel."

Zimmerman is upbeat about Web conferencing, and he says many Gevity HR employees use it every day. "It shortens the sales cycle, saves on training costs and makes our product demos and training more effective."

About Linktivity
Linktivity, a 20 year-old Tucson, Arizona-based division of Converging Technologies Inc., provides server-based communications and control products that enable person-to-person interactions through a browser window. Linktivity products include WebDemo, a Web-based, real-time conferencing and collaboration software tool, and WebInteractive, a real-time software tool that gives support professionals an efficient way to manage and resolve online support requirements for personal computers. For more information, please visit www.linktivity.com.