In this interview, Inès Gourio, creator of ClaPlan, shares the story and vision behind the application that has become essential for training managers.
Born out of the lack of suitable tools for planning and monitoring training activities, ClaPlan is now helping companies to become more efficient.
Team ClaPlan
What is ClaPlan ?
ClaPlan is a SaaS application designed to integrate with SuccessFactors as an additional module. It can be used to manage the company's training plans from the building phase to the monitoring phase, in order to compare the forecast with execution and optimize where necessary.
Thanks to ClaPlan, informed decisions can be made to adjust training programs in line with the company's strategy and budget.
Why and how was ClaPlan created?
What was your approach to meeting a real market need when creating the solution?
Having worked in a training department in the past, I realized how difficult it was to build training plans, which were generally drawn up in Excel, and were time-consuming and tedious. That's why we decided to create a specific tool to facilitate this process.
Working with Florence (product owner) and Mehdi (applications technical manager), who had similar experience, we identified the needs of training professionals and designed screen mock-ups for our solution. By soliciting feedback from potential customers through feedback sessions, we adjusted our initial design, taking their comments into consideration and choosing a new development language to get around the initial technical difficulties.
Inès GOURIO
Florence COLIN
Mehdi NABI
After deploying our solution while considering the technical limitations associated with SAP, we finally created an application that met the expectations of training professionals. Our approach responds to a real market demand by drawing on our own experience, considering user’s feedback to adjust our specifications before development, and creating a first version of the product that directly matches their expectations.
As for the roadmap, it's made up of several elements: adjusting functionalities according to feedback from pilot customers, gathering their requests and feedbak for improvements, during rollouts, feeding back user queries via support to imagine new functionalities, and keeping an eye on legal changes that have an impact on the roadmap's orientations. This ensures that our product evolves in step with customer expectations, and still remains aligned.
What are the company's future prospects and directions?
With a view to continuous improvement, we regularly upgrade our application to ensure an intuitive, user-friendly experience, and develop new features to meet our customers' expectations.. To do this, we make technical and functional modifications, so as optimize performance and maintain the solution on current technologies. We also implement regular technical updates, to optimize performance and keep our solution up to date with the latest technologies.
Over the years, our experience has shown us that this solution, initially designed to meet the expectations of the French market, is also in high demand internationally by companies with multiple locations around the world, looking to manage projected training budgets. Our future developments will support these international customers by offering a wider range of languages, enabling them to extend their scope of use.
Our aim is to have a solution that is as widely used as possible, and that is easy to use. That's why we're doing everything we can to reduce the workload on training managers , enabling them to concentrate on higher value-added tasks, by continuing to develop automated processes to manage mass data in the application, whether, for arbitrating needs or budgeting plans.
What would you like us to remember about ClaPlan?
ClaPlan is a solution developed and maintained in France. Research and Development (R&D) teams work on it every day, with experience that has already been proven with numerous national and international customers.
Today, our main efforts are focused on satisfying our customers and winning over new customers willing to share an experience with us through an in-house Clap Partners solution.
With a view to continuous improvement, we regularly upgrade our application and by working on it and developing new features. To do this, we make technical and functional modifications, so as optimize performance and maintain the solution on current technologies.