A subcontractor arrives on your Christchurch site at 6.45am and nobody can prove he has been inducted

NZD 45,000 to NZD 80,000 for inductions, course delivery and competency records, over 10 to 14 weeks. A full platform with assessment, expiry enforcement and rostering integration runs NZD 110,000 to NZD 160,000. Content production or migration from Moodle adds NZD 10,000 to NZD 40,000.

Yes, and that should be the core requirement rather than a feature. The system holds site specific induction status and current certifications per person, and sign on is refused if either is missing or expired. Supervisors get a live list of who is compliant for their site today, including subcontractor staff.

Deliver the induction to their phone before the day starts, ideally when the job is confirmed, with offline download so it works in the car park with poor signal. Completion is timestamped and signed digitally. The practical benefit is that the crew starts work at seven rather than sitting in the site office with a folder.

It is capable and it is administration heavy, and it is built around courses rather than competency to work. For a business whose real question is whether a specific person can be on a specific site today, Moodle answers a different question and needs continuous configuration to approximate the right one. That admin load usually costs more over three years than a purpose built system.

Yes. Externally issued qualifications and licences are recorded with issue date, expiry and a scanned copy, with reminders ahead of expiry. That matters because most of the certifications your workforce holds were not issued by you, and a system that only tracks its own courses covers a fraction of your real risk.

Randomise questions from a bank, require the assessment on the individual device with their own login, capture location and timestamp, and use practical sign off by a supervisor for anything safety critical. No online assessment is tamper proof on its own, so the honest design combines online knowledge checks with a supervisor observation record.

Yes, and you should. Reporting by contractor firm shows which companies bring compliant crews and which cause delays at the gate, which is useful when you are selecting subcontractors for the next stage. It also matches how your obligations work, since you carry responsibility for workers on your site regardless of who employs them.

Yes, and volume onboarding is one of the strongest cases. Content is delivered before the first shift, completion is tracked in bulk, and supervisors see a live compliance list rather than a stack of forms. For Canterbury processors taking on large seasonal intakes, this removes days of administration each season.

Usually longer, which surprises most clients. The platform takes ten to fourteen weeks and good induction content for a handful of sites often takes a similar time because it needs subject expert input and review. Start content in week one, launch with one site, and expand once the format is proven.

You should, completely, through a written intellectual property assignment that transfers everything on final payment; without that clause, copyright stays with whoever wrote the code by default. Insist that the repository lives in your own GitHub organization from day one and that hosting, domains, and third-party accounts are registered to you. Also check for licenses to the agency's proprietary frameworks buried in the contract, because those can make switching vendors practically impossible even when you own your own code.

Ask them to open a live LMS they built and walk you through the SCORM tracking, the reporting layer, and what happens at your learner volume, because those are the three places cheap builds fail. Then check the contract for full IP assignment, hosting in your own cloud accounts, and a discovery phase before any fixed quote. An agency that prices a full LMS from a one-paragraph brief without discovery is guessing with your budget.

One page with five answers: your learner roles, headcount now and in three years, whether you use SCORM/xAPI content from tools like Articulate or iSpring, the systems it must connect to (HRIS, SSO, payroll), and the one report someone will pull every month. That page gets you comparable quotes instead of guesses, and on Digital Heroes projects it routinely cuts discovery time in half. You do not need wireframes or a technical spec; producing those is the agency's job.

A boring, hireable one: React or Next.js on the front end, Node.js or Python on the back end, PostgreSQL for data, and a managed video service like Mux or Cloudflare Stream instead of self-hosted video. The stack matters far less than the enrollment data model and the SCORM/xAPI runtime, which is where LMS builds actually succeed or fail. The red flag is an exotic stack chosen for the agency's own interest that nobody in your market can maintain.

Plan on 10 to 14 weeks for a working first version and 4 to 6 months for a full corporate platform; those are the typical ranges across Digital Heroes projects. The items that stretch timelines are a SCORM/xAPI runtime, custom video pipelines, and single sign-on against a legacy directory. A phased launch with one department first gets learners into the system months before the full rollout finishes.

Three to five for a typical focused build: a project lead, one or two engineers, a designer, and part-time QA, which is the standard shape across 2,000+ Digital Heroes projects. Larger platforms justify 6 to 10, but a ten-person team on a small first version usually signals bill padding rather than horsepower. What predicts success is whether a senior engineer is writing your code daily, not the headcount on the proposal.

You should, and it must be in the contract: full IP assignment on final payment, the repository in your own GitHub organization, and hosting accounts in your company name. Watch for agencies that build on their proprietary platform and license it back to you, which is a subscription dressed up as custom development. The test is simple: if you cannot hand the code to another team tomorrow, you do not own it.

Digital Heroes builds custom LMS software systems for operators who have outgrown the off-the-shelf tools in their category. The work is delivered remotely: our engineers work from Delhi and Lucknow, leadership is in New York, and some team members live in London and Sydney and work remotely from there. We have no office in Christchurch. You can chat with the team directly, and every form gets an email reply within 24 hours.