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educational programme that follows the guidingprinciples and process methodologies that are endorsedby the Boards of ECR Europe and the National Initiatives(Penning and Karli 2004).The ECR e-coach can be used in a pre-training phasefor all those who are going to attend any of theeducational forms offered by the ECR General LearningProgramme.One of its significant roles here could be levelling theknowledge of attendees before they join the GLPcourses, seminars, or workshops. This is very importantespecially in a collaborative learning process.To understand if and to what extend the ECR e-coachis the supporter of those individual learning processes asintended a first evaluation phase has been run in Englishlanguage with a small group of students from the PoznanSchool of Logistics (see Kopanska 2006).It focused on the learning environment of the e-coachand was therefore based on a guided learning processwith the e-coach materials.By use of a classical pre-/post-design with surveysand knowledge tests evaluation results finally gave proofof the usefulness of their contents, structure and design,but also initiated further improvements of the materials,especially by increasing the amount of interactivity,vividness and clarity.A second evaluation phase is currently running. Here,students from the University of Magdeburg work withthe same elements in German language, as students fromPoznan do simultaneously with the Polish version.One of the key questions to be answered by this set-upis the influence of the language (home vs. foreign) on thelearning outcomes. For this, results of the secondevaluation stage will be compared with each other, butalso with those of the first evaluation.As ECR was found to be attractively foiled whereadvantages of e-coaching could be demonstrated in themost spectacular way, the developed aide can easily beextended towards many other logistics issues, leading toa holistic educational tool enhancing competences andskills of logisticians of different levels of responsibility.SUMMARY AND OUTLOOKApplying the pedagogical principle of coaching to anemerging field of knowledge and competence likeEfficient Consumer Response within a web-basedenvironment delivers a number of challenges to be faced.First, coaching (and e-coaching all the more) is morethan just guided learning. It requires to personalizelearning and to stay in close contact with the learner.Forwarding those tasks to a technical system can only besuccessful if:(i) Learning materials are designed in anappropriate way;(ii) True coaching functionality in the form of asophisticated diagnosis component is provided.The process of developing and implementing the ECRe-coach took both aspects into consideration andmastered the challenges by selecting those fields ofknowledge that represent some crucial problems intoday’s supply chains on one hand and creating wellstructured,attractive multimedia learning modules inEnglish, German and Polish languages on the other.Coaching functionality as discussed in this paper hasonly partially been implemented so far, mainly based oncommunication functionality, and learning support asprovided by the two learning management systems,WebCT and Lotus Learning Space, used.Because platform-independent implementation of thee-coach created some extra problems (e.g. when havingthe need to implement the assessment module by use of athird tool, Macromedia Authorware) and both projectpartners independently, but nearly simultaneously haddecided to change their learning management systemtowards a Moodle open source solution.Further progress in developing the diagnosis systemand with this in improving the quality and amount ofcoaching functionality has been postponed until reimplementationon the new platform will have beenfinalised.Furthermore, some promising parallels to otherknowledge management approaches have been seenwhich most of all will help to improve and extend thematrix approach for identifying learning needs andsubject-constraints (see Strubelt and Neumann 2006).The idea of having not just a check list for identifyingan ECR-related problem, but another matrix more clearlycharacterizing problems by symptoms in the sense ofmeasurable parameters or observable effects will be atremendous help for supply chain improvements inpractice.Giving certain characteristics and observations theright weight and being able to conclude on cause-effectchains in the right way despite of an increasing level ofcomplexity in real life situations, this will open upanother application area to the coaching principle –different from and independent of a learning scenario.Annual Proceedings of Vidzeme University College “ICTE in Regional Development”, 200671