SumTotal Systems, the largest provider of learning and business performance products, services and processes, today announced that insurance and financial services provider, Pacific Life Insurance Company, has transformed its company-wide learning and compliance initiatives with the SumTotal Enterprise Suite. Over the past year, the company has decreased compliance training expenses by 86% and cycle time by 85% via the Pacific Life eAcademy, which delivers online training and learning activities to more than 3500 corporate and field employees.
Pacific Life chose SumTotal to implement an enterprise-wide platform that could support e-learning and meet the challenge of deploying compliance training to employees across the country. Traditionally, the company had delivered mandated training in the classroom, making it difficult for field staff to participate and requiring employees to interrupt their day-to-day jobs for extended periods to attend training sessions. In addition to compliance, the company also wanted to significantly expand opportunities for employees to pursue skills, competencies and career development — something the classroom training model could not easily manage.
Pacific Life used SumTotal’s TotalLMS and TotalLCMS to build the eAcademy, the online training arm of the Pacific Life Academy, which serves employees of the company’s six divisions, both at corporate headquarters and in field offices throughout the U.S. The eAcademy’s online offering met with huge enthusiasm from employees who could now fit training in around their daily job responsibilities, and from management, who could quickly and easily determine employee training progress at a glance.
“SumTotal’s real-time, out-of-the-box reporting gives us a great view of enrollment, activity and training results — something we couldn’t get from our old system,” said Justine Milberg, vice president, Pacific Life Academy and Greg Cleveland, Academy program director and project manager. “We’re still getting employees and management used to the fact that there are so many learning resources available to them now.”
The eAcademy now delivers, manages and tracks all instructor-led and online learning activities, including e-learning developed in-house and 400 SkillSoft courses ranging from business skills such as communication, customer service and project management, to IT skills including desktop applications and more advanced programming. SumTotal also offers the company’s line divisions the opportunity to develop and quickly deliver e-learning specific to their employees and individual products.
“SumTotal offered Pacific Life a solution custom-tailored to our unique needs and it paid for itself in terms of cost savings in the first year after we implemented,” said Milberg and Cleveland. “Right now, we’re just scratching the surface of what the solution can do. We want to develop more courseware in-house and look at blended learning programs. And we expect to continue realizing great ROI with the system. The results we achieved this past year are just a beginning.”
