Tapas Advisory: “With iSpring, We’ve Saved at Least $175,000 by Bringing Course Development In-House.”
5 minutes
Tapas Advisory is a change management and learning consultancy that helps global organizations build workforce capabilities through digital learning. Tapas Advisory has been working with iSpring’s Platinum Reseller, Vivusoft Technologies for the past 4 years.
In this case study, Ram Narayanan, a talent and change management leader, shares how they use iSpring Suite to build a more flexible, in-house approach to course creation.
Background
At Tapas Advisory, we develop digital learning programs for global organizations, including onboarding, product and brand training, and leadership development.
I lead the learning side of this work, combining talent management, change management, and instructional design. For course creation, I had relied primarily on Articulate for years before adding iSpring to our authoring toolkit.
The Challenge: Make Course Creation Accessible to Non-Technical Subject Matter Experts
For years, Ram had been the primary person responsible for course development. Keeping production in-house was important: it gave them more control over updates and deployment and helped avoid the cost of outsourcing eLearning development. But as the number and variety of training needs grew, handling course production largely on his own became difficult to sustain.
The issue was particularly acute in pharma. Because of compliance requirements, certain medical topics couldn’t simply be authored and presented by the L&D team — a doctor needed to provide the medical expertise directly.
“Our company has been driven completely by compliance, so we need a doctor to take a session. I cannot go and take a medical session. For men’s health, for erectile dysfunction, I cannot take it — and more than that, I should not do it as per our compliance policy.”
The challenge was to involve doctors and other subject matter experts directly in course creation without expecting them to master a complex authoring tool.
“The main thing is ease of use. As you know very well, I cannot be everywhere. So, if I’m able to teach the medical fraternity or doctors how to do that, they can do it. The learning curve should be less.”
The company needed a workflow that was simple enough for non-technical experts to contribute to training while allowing them to expand course production beyond one person.
The Solution: iSpring Suite AI
Ram had been using another authoring tool for more than a decade when he discovered iSpring Suite AI at an industry conference. He didn’t replace the existing toolkit — instead, he added iSpring as a complementary solution for the types of training where ease of use and the expert-led training mattered most: particularly onboarding, brand training, and product launches.
Fast, intuitive authoring for non-technical users
Ease of use was one of the main reasons Ram added iSpring to their authoring toolkit. With iSpring, he can hand part of the production process to internal experts instead of creating every piece of training himself.
“Articulate learning curve is very high. So I have to go and teach a doctor. I cannot go and teach him with Articulate… Whereas in iSpring Suite AI, I can teach him: you have to press this button, it will show the video, it will show the slide, you do it.“
This approach makes it practical to involve doctors and other specialists who have the subject expertise but aren’t professional course developers.
“iSpring Suite AI has a very low learning curve, even for someone you’re teaching for the first time.”
Recording expert-led training with slides and presenter video
Another capability Ram relies on is recording the presenter together with the slides. Instead of separating the expert’s presentation from the course, iSpring allows the subject matter expert to deliver the session directly while learners see both the speaker and the supporting presentation.
Ram finds this especially useful for medical and product training, where the credibility and presence of the expert are an important part of the learning experience.
“With iSpring Suite AI, a person can record the slides and show their face at the same time. That’s something I specifically use iSpring for.”
The Results
Since adding iSpring Suite AI to the authoring workflow, Ram and the experts he works with have produced around 175 eLearning course modules. More importantly, course production no longer depends on Ram alone. Doctors can create and record much of the expert content themselves, while Ram focuses on finalizing and publishing the modules.
“For many of these courses, I was mainly involved in publishing them to the platform. Most of the work was done by the doctors. That’s one of the biggest success factors for us — medical professionals can do things that would normally require course authoring skills.”
This shift has also delivered substantial cost savings:
“Even for a basic eLearning module, a vendor would charge around $1,000. If you multiply that by 175 modules, you can see how much we’ve saved. That’s one of the ways we measure our results — because ultimately, we have to bring value to the business.”
Ram also reports a 25–30% improvement in how learners access the courses and apply what they learn compared with the previous period. The team looks beyond course completion: they use assessments to check knowledge and follow-up practice to see whether employees can transfer that learning into their work.
For Ram, that combination matters most: the team can produce more training with internal expertise, spend less on external development, and still see a measurable change in how learners use the training on the job.
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