For more than 130 years, American Red Cross Training Services has delivered premier health and safety training to individuals and businesses in the United States. The Red Cross offers unparalleled flexibility in delivering training for organizations that meets Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) Guidelines, including training online, community classes, and onsite with clients.
With Skedulo’s solution on Salesforce, American Red Cross underwent a digital transformation to automate a process that had slowly evolved over a century.
About The American Red Cross
The American Red Cross shelters, feeds and provides emotional support to victims of disasters; supplies about 40 percent of the nation’s blood; teaches skills that save lives; provides international humanitarian aid; and supports military members and their families. The Red Cross is a nonprofit organization that depends on volunteers and the generosity of the American public to perform its mission.
Among its many services, American Red Cross has long prepared individuals and communities for disasters and helped organizations meet health and safety preparedness goals. In the U.S., the Red Cross offers 60,000 courses annually, ranging from nurse assistant to first aid certifications.
Disconnected Systems Made Scheduling Training Painful
American Red Cross Training Services are immense in scale. Every year, 1,250 mobile trainers help deliver 60,000 courses to 530,000 individuals. The operational complexity of their training program was simply more than the tools they had could manage.
First, there was a gap in where data was stored for different types of training programs. Some types of customers and contracts were stored in Salesforce CRM, while others were legacy systems or in spreadsheets. So there was no clear source of truth about customers and the organization’s obligations to them.
Second, data about the many courses offered was in a learning management system (LMS). That system housed the content, requirements, and logic for the 60,000 courses. Since this information is necessary to make decisions about who is assigned to deliver which courses and when, schedulers at American Red Cross had to take data from that system and manually cross-reference it against multiple spreadsheets where information about their mobile instructors was kept.
The last piece of the puzzle was the spreadsheets, emails, and shared calendars where information about instructors and the facilities where some Red Cross open enrollment courses are delivered.
“Each region managed its own instructors separately in spreadsheets and email, so there wasn’t any system that could provide visibility at the national level into our mobile workforce and how we were scheduling them,” said Joe Zito, vice president of information technology at American Red Cross.
