SumTotal Systems, the industry’s largest provider of learning and business performance technologies, services and processes, today announced that Aetna (NYSE: AET), one of the nation’s leading providers of health care, dental, pharmacy, group life, disability and long-term care benefits, has chosen the SumTotal Enterprise Suite to drive a sophisticated, performance-driven talent management strategy for more than 28,000 employees across the enterprise.
Over the past three years, Aetna has developed a successful talent and performance management program that ties individual employee “scorecards” back to the company’s business strategies. As the program has grown Aetna as been moving toward a more multi-functional initiative that integrates talent management with learning to help individuals improve their scorecards and drive greater business results for the company.
According to Deborah Kelly, head of learning services for Aetna, the company chose the SumTotal Suite to replace the company’s previous legacy system because SumTotal provided greater scalability and adaptability, and more readily integrated with Aetna’s other ERP applications. “As Aetna moved into a more sophisticated phase of its talent management strategy, it was important that we select a learning management system with more robust functionality that could integrate seamlessly with our internal and external infrastructure to drive a coherent, performance-driven talent management strategy,” she said.
Aetna’s goal in combining its talent management and learning initiatives is to integrate a number of processes into a single program that encompasses skills and competencies development, staffing, succession planning, internal and external job movement, project and staff assignments, promotions and “bench” — or employee talent — assessments, among other human capital management processes, tying all of them back to the company’s business strategy.
“Aetna makes a substantial investment in building world-class, strategy-driven skills in its workforce,” said Kelly. “Our learning philosophy demands a return on that investment by linking learning directly to the skills and competencies required to drive Aetna’s success. We wanted a partner that shared that philosophy and could demonstrate that kind of return. SumTotal not only provides a full range of integrated learning, performance and talent management capabilities, but focuses as we do on making real, measurable business results its ultimate goal.”
Aetna plans to gauge the success of its enhanced talent management initiative in the short term by measuring increases in adoption rates and system usage among employees compared with usage of its previous legacy system. Longer term, the company plans to measure the program’s success based on its ability to retain top talent, to increase its “bench strength” (measured by internal movement of talent and decreased staffing costs), and its increased ability to link training data directly back to specific business results.
“Aetna’s vision for how technology plays an integral role in managing it’s most important asset — it’s people — is exciting for SumTotal because it directly maps to our vision for our products and our offerings,” said Andy Eckert, SumTotal CEO. “While I still see rudimentary definitions in the industry of Learning Management Systems being merely a system to track training, companies like Aetna are proving that sophisticated platforms like the SumTotal Enterprise Suite are managing an organization’s talent top to bottom through all phases of development. When combined with business results indicators, our technology is clearly a mission-critical application which is driving business strategy and business performance.”
