What is our primary use case?
I'm currently working on projects with PeopleFluent (the SaaS version), that's about Talent Management. Part of Talent Management is learning. They recently, approximately two years ago, acquired the company NetDimensions, which is an AQL learning management system, and they integrated it into their talent management suite. That specifically is my point of expertise — I specialize in the learning management part of it.
Currently, I am rolling it out for an organization that has locations all over the world (it's a corporate airline) — I'm an independent consultant. I implemented their learning management environment as part of the talent management suite, which that organization has acquired. It's an implementation for approximately 3,000 internal, and approximately 3,000 external users. In total, roughly 6,000 users. The external users are the ground handling crew and the internal users are staff, pilots, et cetera.
This solution will be used by everybody starting the second quarter of this year.
How has it helped my organization?
This solution is extremely flexible and the automation capabilities are great. Usually, the process of certification and re-certification includes quite an amount of manual labor, including scheduling, and rostering, especially when it comes to including classroom and live events, but this environment is able to automate it completely.
What is most valuable?
Learning Management, that's the one I am certified in. Certification is key in order to allow those employees to do their job.
We have to track certification, auto-enroll people in courses. Certification involves manual procedures. There's a lot of procedural environments around certification, which is key. Otherwise, they wouldn't have a license to operate.
What needs improvement?
The integration capabilities could be improved. Integration of the recently acquired Learning Management System into the PeopleFluent suite, since it's clear that it's just recently acquired and it's not fully integrated.
It's user friendly. It's a user-friendly solution for the functions you experience, but it's not the same user experience over all of the tools you have. If you have a different tool from within data management, you'll have a different interface.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability of the product itself is okay. The stability of the integration is causing some issues.
That's because of the nature of the source of the organization — coming from a Hong Kong-based organization with support in the Philippines. PeopleFluent itself is a US-based organization and has development facilities in the US. They have to communicate with each other and that sometimes becomes an issue.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
PeopleFluent is meant for large-scale organizations, so scalability is high.
Adding on users isn't a problem. It's capable of dealing with global organizations. So across time, across different domains, different organization structures, there's no problem at all. Multilingual, no problem. I believe it has over 30 languages.
How are customer service and technical support?
The technical support is high-end. They're knowledgeable people, both in the US and in the Philippines. One point of improvement — they should talk more to each other.
They're quite responsive, but it depends on the scope of the ticket. If it's just solving an issue from one product, you can have either a consultant from the US or from the Philippines. It gets difficult when a solution is about integration. For instance, authentication mechanisms. Authentication mechanisms come from the US and they have to be incorporated in the Asia version. Then it's difficult because support has to talk to each other.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I'm an implementation consultant and I do project management also, various ones. At another company, I worked with IMC, a German learning management system or talented suite.
They are pretty similar solutions. The functionality is pretty much equivalent.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was complex. It's straightforward in generic terms, but the devil is in the details. Getting a reliable version for full automation is complex.
What about the implementation team?
I'm the external consultant helping the clients with implementation. I have experience in this environment, but we do business directly with PeopleFluent. We have a team of people who handle deployment. Deployment takes time. We're half a year in, but we're almost done.
Firstly, we perform an out-of-the-box implementation and then we move on to configuring the catalogs and content. Once that has been done, simultaneously, we configure the synchronization with SAP, because SAP contains all of the employee data.
These two paths have to come together before implementation. If you look at it, PeopleFluent Talent Management in general, we do it module by module and learning is the last module to be implemented.
In the end, after implementation, I hand it over to the organization and the upgrade itself will be done by PeopleFluent, it's a SAAS solution — all maintenance is handled by them.
What was our ROI?
I can't say anything about the ROI because that's more on the customer side and since we are still implementing, it's too early to mention the ROI.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I'm not involved in the pricing, so I don't have a clue how it works. I believe from previous projects, where I encountered the PeopleFluent Dimension series solution, it's somewhere midterm — it's in the middle. It's not too expensive, but not too cheap either. I did not do any financial negotiations for this company.
We pay per user on a yearly basis. I don't believe there are any additional costs.
What other advice do I have?
Make sure you have agreements on the integration of the Learning Management in the PeopleFluent suite. Make appointments on it, agreements on it, contractual. How to interact with each other. I find the PeopleFluent implementation support to be extremely flexible and generous towards their customers. I have unlimited access to their resources to make the project work, which is not the case with a lot of the vendors.
The biggest lesson I have learned from using this solution: never take something for granted. Even if the functionality is said to be great, you still may be surprised by the bugs you may find. That's a lesson that probably will count for any software. Every software has bugs, but you find them at unexpected moments.
Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give PeopleFluent Talent Management a rating of eight.
I would give it a 10 out of 10 if they gave it a more modern look. If you are a wanting to be the self-service system for users, the amazon.com of learning, you have to make that process more appealing, more self-explaining. So make it look fancier — especially the dashboards and interface.
