Undisputed are the dramatic cost savings to both industrial and governmental enterprises from adopting e-learning.  Some examples:

• Training Magazine: A study across industries found that corporations saved 50 percent to 70 percent of their overall training cost by replacing traditional training with on-line delivery.  From another study, W.R. Hambrecht & Company reported similar savings.
• IBM: One year after launching comprehensive, online management training in 1999, the company reported that it was able to deliver five times the training at one-third the cost.  Estimated cost savings were $200 million.  

• Oracle: The rapid adoption of e-learning strategies enabled Oracle to cut internal learning costs by 40 percent, while increasing net student enrollments by 36 percent; “compress the knowledge supply chain”; and build and deploy new courses in weeks instead of months.

• Caterpillar: The company found that e-learning had a clear cost advantage over instructor-led training.  Even with a population as small as 100, and a class as short as one hour, e-learning was still 40 percent less expensive.  In addition to cost savings, the company has concluded that e-learning can be delivered faster across its global organization, due to greater learning efficiency, timeliness, consistency, and ease
  of updating material.

Although a higher initial investment is usually required to implement e-learning across the enterprise, this investment is quickly offset by tremendous savings in the delivery of the material developed.  While traditional classroom training is associated with 20-to-1 student-teacher ratios, one e-learning course can be used to train thousands of students.  The decreasing cost of network bandwidth and computers, as well as the growing libraries of high-quality, off-the-shelf content, add to this savings.

Besides more efficient delivery, the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD) attributes cost savings largely to employee time saved.  Another key source of savings is travel, since training is no longer offsite.  In 2000, two-thirds of the $66 billion total corporate training budgets were devoted to employee travel.  That is changing.

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