Training Vendor

A training vendor is anybody outside the company you buy training from: an institute, a consulting firm, or a single freelance trainer. You list them here once so a plan, a session and an external trainer can all point at the same name.

Where

Training Management › Setup › Training Vendor

Who uses it

The training manager, when a new provider is engaged

When

Before an external course is planned or scheduled

Needs first

Nothing

What it is for

Internal training needs no vendor. The moment a client sends people outside, or brings somebody in, there is a provider to name, and a client will want to know at the end of the year how much went to each of them.

Keep the list to the providers actually used. A vendor record here is not a purchase record, so do not create one for a firm that only quoted.

Every external trainer must point at one of these vendors, so create the vendor before you create the trainer.

Every field, in plain words

Field	What it means	What to put in it	Notes
Training Vendor	The short code you will see in lists and lookups.	PSTD	Required. Must be unique.
Name	The provider's full name.	Pakistan Society for Training and Development	Required.
Vendor Type	What kind of provider this is.	IST Institute	Required. See the list below.
Vendor Mapping	A reference used to tie this training vendor to the same company held elsewhere.	Leave it empty unless your implementation has agreed a use for it	The screen stores whatever you type. Nothing in the training module reads it, so agree the convention with the client before using it.

Vendor Type values:

• IST Institute. A registered training body with its own premises and its own course catalogue. Pick this for a technical institute or a university short course.
• CON Consultant. A firm you engage to deliver training, usually at your own site. Pick this for an ISO consultancy running internal auditor training in your boardroom.
• IDT Individual Trainer. One self employed person. Pick this for the retired safety officer who comes in twice a year to run fire drills.

How to configure it

1. Ask the client for the list of providers they used last year and are likely to use again.
2. Create one record each: code PSTD, Name Pakistan Society for Training and Development, Vendor Type Institute. Save.
3. For a consultancy, code QSYS, Name Quality Systems Consultants, Vendor Type Consultant.
4. For a freelance trainer, code IQBAL, Name Muhammad Iqbal Safety Training, Vendor Type Individual Trainer.
5. Now go to Trainer and create the named person who actually stands in front of the class for each external vendor.

Scenarios

The same institute sends us three different instructors

Create one vendor for the institute and three trainers against it. The vendor is who you pay. The trainer is who teaches. A session names both, so the feedback a participant gives is attached to the instructor who taught, and the cost stays against the institute.

We brought a consultant in-house and now he works for us

Do not change the vendor record. Create a new internal trainer on the Trainer screen pointing at his employee record, and stop using the external trainer. The sessions he taught as an outsider stay attached to the vendor, which is what the client wants when they look back at last year's spend.

What it is connected to

• Trainer requires a vendor for every external trainer.
• Training Plan names a vendor on the plan and on each planned course line.
• Training Schedule names the vendor delivering the session.

If something looks wrong

• "It will not let me save" - either the code is already in use, or the name or vendor type is blank. All three are required.
• "The vendor list is empty when I create an external trainer" - no vendor has been created yet. An external trainer cannot be saved without one.