EVALUATING THE E-LEARNING IMPACT ON COMPANY'S NON-FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE

In nowadays economy, the so-called "new economy", a wide interest is granted to the "knowledge society", to the employee who owns the knowledge, to the intellectual capital and to the learning organizations. From this point of view, an organization that fails to learn may be sub-optimal or even dysfunctional. Also, a company with a continuous tendency of learning has a better chance to respond to customer needs, to sense the market opportunities and to offer more appropriate and more precisely targeted products, all these driving the enterprise to superior levels of profitability, sales growth and customer retention. Through the evolution of all kind of environments, over the past years, all the traditional learning techniques were revised and new ones were introduced. Web applications and e-Learning were the revolutionary new ways through which the workforce got the necessary needed skills and knowledge. Based on these perspectives, e-Learning is believed to be a very important cause for enterprises' non-financial success. The present paper focuses on the quantitative and qualitative variables that best characterize the presence and impact of e-Learning on company's non-financial performance. Before these variables are described, a discussion related to the measurement and importance of non-financial performance is done. Even it has no intrinsic value to managers, the non-financial performance can be a leading indicator of financial performance, especially for future financial performance that is not yet contained in the accounting measures. Based on some new found theories like grey systems theory and on some well-known theories like fuzzy sub-set theory, the impact of e-Learning inclusion and application in business processes is measured. The steps that should be followed for doing this measurement are also underlined along with some mathematical approach references needed in building-up the proposed model. The paper is structured as follows: first section, Introduction, presents the importance of studying this topic in nowadays environmental context in which firms are carrying their activities. Section two is stressing the problem regarding the e-Learning process in enterprise's environment and draws the main characteristics of it. Section three speaks about the non-financial performance importance and some ways of measuring it. The model for evaluating the impact of e-Learning on company's health and non-financial performance is presented in section four. Some concluding remarks, future work and selected references are depicted in the end. Knowing the impact and the stage of e-Learning in an organization and acting properly on the identified e-Learning characteristics, not only the employees' professional abilities can be improved but even the firm's performance can rise significantly.