2 Reasons why HRMS and LMS Integration is Essential

A Learning Management System (LMS) is an application that most companies cannot live without these days as it handles training data as well as education and certification details, and even the requesting and approval of training through workflow. Despite its potential for training management, nearly all LMS rely heavily on integration with core HRMS software. The process of LMS integration is not an easy one, but one that will provide your employee training program with more accurate data and better reporting capabilities.

1. LMS Integration Reduces Dual Data Entry

Job or position is essential to determine training needed for certain roles or levels. Organizational details such as manager and cost center are helpful for workflow routing and costing purposes. Finally, basic details such as name and location are always stored in an LMS too.

Building an integration from your core HRMS to your LMS will offer much in the way of time savings due to no dual data entry, as well as improving your data integrity since there is one source for the data.

2. LMS Integration Reduces Data Discrepancies

When an integration to an LMS does not exist, data discrepancies often arise leading to time-consuming analysis when running reports from two different systems. A common issue is that an employee’s legal name in the core HRMS may differ in spelling or switch to a nickname if manually entered into the LMS.

Many other basic HR data points are rarely entered into the LMS or can become outdated compared to the information in your core HRMS. Employee location, job title or position are frequently ‘old’ data that you only notice later in reports or during annual comparisons of the systems.

Getting Started with HRMS and LMS Integration

How do you go about defining your integration needs? A side-by-side comparison of fields stored in the LMS and core HRMS is a start. Ensuring that there is a shared ‘key’ piece of data to match the employees, such as employee id number, is essential. It’s useful to give thought to expected integration frequency: how often will the integration run, real-time, hourly, nightly or weekly? What is the support structure to troubleshoot if there are questions about the integrated data? Many companies require new employees to take online training right away, so issues need to get sorted quickly when they arise. A final piece to consider is security; will your core HRMS drive the user security in the LMS or will you handle it within the LMS only?

An alternative to HRMS and LMS integration is to source a core HR system which has a wealth of training features provided out-of-the-box. This solution may cost you more in the short-term, but the time and money saved from not having to integrate systems and datasets can be an attractive long-term proposition.