Smith & Nephew selects WBT's TopClass

Dateline: 23 July 2003

WBT Systems, one of the leading providers of Enterprise e-Learning solutions, today announced that Smith and Nephew, one of the leading medical devices companies in the world, has selected the TopClass e-Learning Suite to deliver a global e-Learning Solution to an initial 2,500 staff in 8 countries. The solution enables Smith and Nephew to provide a blended learning approach for their staff, while tracking and reporting all training on one system. TopClass Publisher has enabled Smith and Nephew to repurpose existing content as Learning Objects which can be shared across the company, reducing costs and speeding content development time.

The solution will provide customised training programmes for roles within the organisation - sales people will be given product training in their own languages, operatives will be given Standard Operating Procedures and Health and Safety training. All employees will receive induction and corporate values training on the TopClass solution.

Smith and Nephew wants to make e-Learning an integral part of the culture of the company and develop staff training beyond traditional instructor led courses. They believe a blended learning approach will increase the effectiveness of their training. Another important aspect is the ability to repurpose existing training content which can be shared across the organisation. The Executive Management Team specifically tasked the e-Learning team with developing a Talent Bank, a repository of employee skills, competencies and training. As a global company, Smith and Nephew operates using global teams. In order to bring together the most suitable teams, the Talent Bank will allow people to search the repository for the most suitable people for a particular job.

Smith and Nephew had an existing investment in e-Learning systems and content, including TopClass in the US. Based on the success of this project, Smith and Nephew decided that a global platform was required to reduce costs and share information across the organisation. TopClass was chosen as the global platform because of its open standards approach, the ability to repurpose content quickly using TopClass Publisher and the ability to manage staff skills using TopClass Competencies.

"With TopClass we know we will save costs on travel and accommodation, even more so on content repurposing, sharing of platform and content across the organisation. All while extending reach," said Mark Stefko, e-Business Project Director, Smith and Nephew. "But the real value to Smith and Nephew is that TopClass helps extend our educational investments, raise the competency level of every staff member, increase collaboration and help to communicate in a consistent way across the organisation."

"We are delighted with the success of Smith and Nephew's implementation of TopClass. The idea of the Talent Bank is very interesting and something we are helping several large organisations to develop using TopClass Competencies," said Declan Kelly, CEO, WBT Systems. "As Smith and Nephew have shown, TopClass Publisher and Competencies both differentiate us from our competitors, and these products help to speed delivery and ultimately reduce cost of training."

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