BPP Learning Media – the company that supplies materials directly to your students - has been up and running for a few months now.
Because your students contract with two different companies – BPP LM for materials and BPP Professional Education for tuition - this first edition of LEARNING MEDIA NEWS introduces you to some of the people and functions to give you an overview.
Future editions will offer short regular updates about the company, its clients its products and its people.
Most of you will have come across at least some of our products but only a few of you will be familiar with the many types of customer we are privileged to serve. As well as selling books and notes directly to classroom and distance learning students on BPP Professional Education’s courses, in 2006 we sold products in 176 countries, from CAT I-learns to universities in north Somalia to DipFM books to United Nations offices in North Korea: so the story is niche product, global brand. We also deal directly with some of the professional bodies (ICAEW and ACCA for example). Some of the most promising long term opportunities might surprise you, Africa being a good example.
We operate from three sites:
- the first floor of BPP House in Notting Hill borders (Shepherd’s Bush, please yourselves),
- the warehouse in Greenford (see Karen Hillmansen’s peice)
- and our elearning production office in Livingston located between Edinburgh and Glasgow.
(See Caroline Macfie’s piece).
Just as an indication of scale, the studio processes around 2500 items of production a year. With print runs ranging from 500 to 7000 per item, at a rough guess the warehouse has to despatch around 5 single million items per year.
Anyhow, BPP LM has a growth agenda. BPP LM aims to extract maximum commercial benefit and brand awareness from intellectual property. There is plenty of scope to grow in existing markets as well as tackling new ones – that is why we are beefing up our sales force. There will be a drip feed of new product announcements, for example our new City Essentials and Business Essentials lists.
We need to be ahead of the game – the advantage of working with demanding stakeholders, from time-pressured students on the Tube to the Examiners of a number of the professional bodies, is that, because they are never satisfied, we are never satisfied. Sometimes we don’t communicate too well the sorts of changes we intend to make.
An important value for BPP Learning Media is to be ‘easy to deal with’. Relationships are key to this business in the long term. On a personal level, I think we are ‘easy to deal with’. But our systems, structures and processes have let us down in the past. I am delighted to report progress on this front - see Lana Doyle’s description of changes to the customer service team.
Anyhow, that’s enough from me.
Edmund
