Accreditations Category Procurement Intelligence Report

Business practices within Accreditations market are heavily influenced by changing trends across the category as well as within the broader Development and Training market. The market for e-learning services is exploding in developed and developing economies alike. L&D possibilities enabled by gamification, LMS apps and new content delivery methods have impacted the procurement of Accreditations in a massive way.

Although companies are providing more learning opportunities and resources to employees, actual percentage of employees who have seriously completed such learning activities in still very low. Some of the reasons responsible for this trend are a 'one training fits all' approach, lack of personalization, engagement and demonstration of benefits in an employee's current work profile. Companies as well as L&D suppliers have realized these challenges and are coming up with solutions such as gamification and L&D delivery through multiple platforms.

Integration of the latest technology in learning requires significant investments and therefore procurement costs are expected to rise for learning modules based on advanced technologies. In the long run, buyers could see stable pricing as suppliers recover their technology cost.

As a result, category managers need to closely monitor the Accreditations procurement trends and identify changes required in their procurement environment for the category.

It has become imperative for category managers to remain as agile as possible in terms of their procurement practices. However, it is not always easy to quickly spot and implement alternative practices in a category like Accreditations. To help quick decision making, this report advises on several procurement best practices that have worked well for category managers.

For example, Category managers should evaluate the RFQ's from service providers against the industry benchmarks as this helps buyers to gain a better understanding of the market prices and save costs.

Blended learning solutions are a mix of instructor-led learning and web-based learning. These solutions aid buyers to reduce training implementation costs and enhance the effectiveness of training. Hence, buyers must collaborate with service providers that offer blended training solutions.

Buyers must collaborate with service providers that offer mobile learning solutions, which help in accessing the training material from any location. This will aid employees from departments such as sales, which may not be able to attend all training sessions conducted onsite and achieving better ROI on L&D.

Accreditations procurement managers also need to proactively identify and mitigate potential risks that can arise in the supply chain or contracts for Accreditations procurement. Some examples include: