Solbourne and Oracle Simplify Employee Training with UPK
October 2007
Corporate learning is growing; according to a 2007 research report by Bersin and Associates, the corporate learning market demonstrated budget increases averaging 7%. Total training spending grew from $51.1B in 2005 to $55.8B in 2006. Companies realize there is a direct payoff to helping employees use business applications more effectively to perform their jobs. Solbourne, an Oracle Certified Advantage Partner, is helping meet the need for Oracle E-Business Suite training with its User Productivity Kit (UPK) Accelerator Program, a service for the Oracle UPK learning content development and customization tool.
Oracle UPK enables companies to create business procedures and self-paced learning materials to reflect specific business practices and application environments, as well as easily create and deploy custom content. To further facilitate the training development process, Solbourne's UPK Accelerator leverages a large documented business process library for Oracle E-Business Suite applications that facilitates the rapid development of UPK content.
Solbourne has 15 years of experience developing training topics for Oracle E-Business Suite. The company has streamlined decision making related to content development with its extensive library of more than 1,500 documented business processes. The library is further divided into six application tracks, including Financials, Human Capital Management, and Reporting and Technical, which has been particularly popular with customers. Joe Kuntner, Solbourne Director of Education Consulting, says, "Having a library of documented business processes saves time. Our library enables rapid custom content development and with our guidance, training development goes a lot quicker. We're based on leading practices, and that's where 15 years of experience comes in. We know exactly the right practices to use."
UPK Accelerator offers significant cost savings because firms can drastically reduce the amount they spend for training content topic development — usually by 50-66%. According to Solbourne executives, since its introduction in 2007, the response to UPK Accelerator has been very positive. Kuntner reports, "Oracle UPK is a phenomenal tool, and combined with UPK Accelerator has meant that customers already see benefits and feel like they're saving thousands of dollars in training costs."
According to Beth Renstrom, Oracle's Principal Product Manager for UPK, "Partnering support for Oracle UPK has been significant and has enabled us to reach our customers in the marketplace to show the value of UPK. Solbourne has been a contributor to this success." She sees Solbourne's rapid content development service offering providing value to Oracle customers who need help getting started with UPK, helping users put together a framework around the content they develop.
Solbourne's long-standing relationship with Oracle enables it to ensure that its library of documented business processes is accurate and current. Kuntner says, "Our customers use various releases of Oracle E-Business Suite, but we are already anticipating the needs related to Release 12 and future developments in other areas such as business intelligence."
Renstrom reveals that Oracle plans to launch a new version of Oracle UPK in the second half of fiscal year 2008, UPK 3.1. "It's the first major release of the product in several years and will offer greater flexibility deploying and managing content with version control, check-in and check-out capabilities, and enhanced multilingual capabilities."
Kuntner believes the UPK Accelerator Program is a tool that has appeal for a broad audience and is a great match with Oracle UPK. "We're very excited to be a partner with Oracle. It's been a phenomenal experience working with them. Solbourne wants to be the thought leader implementing and using Oracle UPK in an organization."
