Solution Briefs

Sun Life Financial is a leading international financial services organization providing a diverse range of wealth accumulation and protection products and services to individuals and corporate customers. Sun Life Financial and its partners have operations in key markets worldwide, including Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Japan, Indonesia, India, China and Bermuda. As of June 30, 2002, the Sun Life Financial group of companies had total assets under management of CDN $368.6 billion.

The Canadian organization has more than 10,000 employees including a sales force of approximately 4000 agents. Most training had been handled traditionally through classroom, video and CBT. Having seen a trend towards online learning over the last couple of years, they have developed a strategy on adopting a blended approach in the future.

Relying on manual tracking methods and a variety of disparate registration systems, it became more difficult and complex to track and manage its training program due to the organization's fast growth rate and disperse workforce. In addition, the organization needed a more efficient way to certify its sales agents to meet regulatory and corporate compliance.

To develop a Canadian strategy that will provide better quality training in a managed environment. To select and implement the best suited tools for managing and delivering training and to provide a mechanism to automate the coordination of agent certifications.

Sun Life Financial approached several vendors and ultimately selected eMisphere Solutions to meet this challenge because of its specialized knowledge in e-Learning platforms and its consultative approach.

Human Resources Development Canada’s mission is to “enable Canadians to participate fully in the workplace and community.” It fulfills this mandate by administering federal Acts, Regulations and its Corporate Plan in more than 320 offices across the country, with the objective of enhancing employment, encouraging equality and promoting social security.

In many tangible ways, HRDC is the face of government to most Canadians. In order to improve their services to citizens, HRDC Insurance Training Group wanted to make its training programs more readily accessible to their employees. They believed that by putting many of these programs online, the easy access would result in better service.

The first major challenge was to develop a consistent approach to e-learning by defining a standard way to produce their e-learning content. Further, the challenge involved developing an instructional design specific to the four modules selected for the initial migration.

HRDC Insurance Training Group selected eMisphere because of its high-end e-learning expertise to develop instructional design of e-learning material and its reputation in showing positive results in similar environments.

MDS Pharma Services is a leading provider of innovative drug discovery and development solutions, offering a full spectrum of resources to the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. It is part of MDS Inc. (TSE: MDS; NYSE: MDZ), an international health and life sciences company, employing more than 10,000 highly skilled people in its global operations on five continents.

MDS Pharma Services upgraded the Lotus Notes mail client to release R5. The project objectives consisted in upgrading all mail clients within a very short period of time, training people on the new software while keeping up at the same rate it is being deployed.

A concurrent upgrade to Lotus Notes R5 meant time was a constraint, as the concern was naturally to optimize the efforts of its deployment teams. And the migration of over 800 employees to Lotus Notes R5 pressed the need for an alternative training solution to be ready following the rollout. MDS Pharma needed the solution to train its employees in three different languages.

There were 2 main objectives:

1. Minimize the loss of productivity by training 800 employees rapidly.
2. Perform a proof-of-concept to demonstrate the efficiency of e-Learning as a valuable alternative to traditional training methods.

The first priority was to get a Learning Management System (LMS) up and running as quickly as possible. Given MDS Pharma’s technical expertise and Information Technology structure, we recommended a “Quick Start” implementation package - a very focused and specialized service offering, where we let the client do the pre-work using our standard documentation before our team arrives on site.

Secondly, we provided instant, self-paced training to the employees on the new release of Lotus Notes. Installing a Lotus Notes R5 End-User suite of off-the-shelf courseware in French, English and Spanish, provided the efficient and cost-effective training solution MDS Pharma Services desired.