Apprenticeship Case Study: Riverside Training

Riverside Training is an established provider with a wealth of industry knowledge and experience. The company works nationally within a broad range of industries and over the past 24 years has prided itself on building the right training and delivery solutions for its clients.

The challenge

Riverside identified that its multiple existing systems were time-consuming and outdated, making it difficult to efficiently and effectively meet clients’ needs as well as limiting their ability to grow.

While these were low-cost, they were simply serving as a place to store data and files rather than helping the organisation to meet its objectives, serve clients and, ultimately, scale.

Enrolments were performed on paper and then manually transferred into both funding and e-portfolio systems. The process was creating significant duplication work for the trainers and administration team, negatively impacting costs, data accuracy, and compliance.

Moreover, their existing e-portfolio was legacy built for frameworks rather than designed for the modern world of Standards and the need to effectively track progress. Combined with a funding system that provided limited integration capabilities, everything took much longer from enrolment to reporting and everything in between.

“The existing approach was causing a rise in costs and time spent on administration,” Paul Workman, Finance Manager of Riverside Training, tells us. “Our enrolment process alone took over three hours which was limiting our ability to increase revenue and support growth through additional learners.”

As a result, Riverside sought to replace its systems with the aim of eliminating the administrative burden. The key aim was to build an infrastructure that could increase the team’s capacity to deliver modern and engaging training and delivery solutions for clients.

The solution

After an in-depth evaluation of the market, Bud Systems was identified as the clear choice to enable Riverside to meet its objectives. The platform’s streamlined, best-practice approach to the entire apprenticeship delivery journey was designed to significantly minimise administration time, errors and the associated costs.

Read more: Choosing the perfect platform

Bud’s self-service data capture for the applicant helped improve accuracy, reduce administrative effort and provide a much greater learner and employer experience of the enrolment process. “Compliance status features are built in to guide us through standards and regulations in an easy format, reducing the occurrence of errors and their related overhead costs,” Paul adds.

Bud’s complete approach to tracking learner progress proves invaluable for ensuring that learners remain fully supported, on-track and are ready for End Point Assessment in a timely manner.

Bud also allows Riverside to actively monitor and control every aspect of their delivery from funding to data accuracy, as Paul explains. “The complete visibility Bud’s system provides is an excellent asset for managing our training.”

Changing systems can be daunting and recognising this Bud’s best-practice approach extends into implementation and training, providing step-by-step support from a team with apprenticeship delivery experience coupled with expert product knowledge. “Bud supervised the whole delivery process and provided continuous consultation to ensure that the platform was easily adopted by every area of the organisation.”

The result

After using the Bud system for 18 months, it’s fair to say that the decision to adopt the solution has been a huge success. “Because of Bud’s thorough onboarding model, the efficiency of the system improved as well,” Paul says. “Errors and compliance issues reduced significantly, email traffic dropped, and average sign-up time for trainers has decreased from 90 to 18.5 minutes.”

The number of learners on Riverside Training’s programme has increased by 37% and administration has decreased dramatically by 75%. With the substantial time, administration effort and overhead savings, Bud has increased the company’s capacity for new learners per month by 54, which equates to an increase of over £200k in revenue. Furthermore, trainers have less admin and so more time to spend supporting learners and adding measurable value to each and every client.

The future

Bud and Riverside Training’s partnership is built on a shared goal to enable the highest standard of specialist training and management for businesses. Thus far, Paul thinks this has been realised and that the future for the company and its learners is bright.

“It’s all the little things that Bud joins together seamlessly and its well thought-through, intelligent approach to tasks that you don’t fully appreciate that has enabled us to drive quality and scale effortlessly. That intelligent approach appears to be unique in the market and reassures us that we are in safe hands as the industry evolves.”

The most complete training management platform

Does your training business want to reduce admin overheads, improve success rates and bring all your training and funding data into a single source of truth with full one-click visibility of trainer caseload, learner progress and funding claims?

Bud takes the back-end resource cost from your team so they can focus on what they are best at, and managers can have the information they need at their fingertips to make decisions to keep moving your training business forward.

Contact us for a quick chat to discuss options. If you feel ready to take the next step, then book a zero-obligation, bespoke demonstration of Bud’s Training Management software for you and your team and see how you can directly benefit from using the platform.