ICON is a global provider of outsourced development services to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device industries. The company specializes in the strategic development, management and analysis of programs that support clinical development.
The pharmaceutical industry is heavily regulated and these regulations change by country and even by region. When it comes to training for ICON’s over 6,800 employees globally, keeping track of changing training requirements for the various job roles for employees in 38 different countries is a huge challenge, not to mention the overhead and administration burden of filing, storing and tracking the paperwork and certifications for regulatory reporting purposes.
Traditionally ICON delivered all employee training in a classroom setting however they wanted to have the ability to more efficiently offer routine training globally, training that was accessible around the clock, regardless of location and time-zone for all employees. This would mean moving a significant portion of their courses online and being able to manage training scheduling globally.
Solution
In order to achieve their e-Learning and global training management goals, ICON needed a flexible solution that would support the following:
- The ability for employees to self serve, having online visibility of their learning plans as specified by functional job role with self-registration of courses, from any location at any given time
- The ability for employees to self serve online training courses on-demand and the ability for the organization to prompt immediate or scheduled recertification of specific training
- The ability for management to assign additional training to an individual aligned with their specific development needs
- The ability to schedule multi-location instructor-led training events within a single event instance
- Learning plans for each functional job role with the flexibility to cater for different requirements and regulations across countries, regions and divisions of ICON and an automated function that changed an employee’s learning plan as the employee changed functional roles.
- Support for 21 CFR Part 11 compliant electronic signatures to enable employees, managers and instructors to validate course completions for all types of training delivery (instructor-led, online, on-the-job and self-paced), eliminating the need for paper documentation.
- With Documentum and PeopleSoft HRIS already in use at ICON, it was important that the chosen solution could integrate for ongoing migration and view of the necessary employee data and company documents
- Robust tracking and reporting functionality so that ICON could demonstrate training compliance in a regulatory environment
ICON selected WBT’s TopClass due to its capability and scalability to meet their training delivery and documentation requirements long term, including compliance with 21 CFR Part 11. Additionally, the ease of use of the system for both the training department users and end users was key in selecting the system. Today approximately 40 percent of ICON’s training is delivered online and they currently have approximately 1,000 e-Learning courses in TopClass. The majority of online courses are focused on policies, procedures, good clinical practice and basic computer software & systems training. The courses are accessible around the clock to ICON employees globally.
Benefits
For ICON, the benefits of using TopClass are significant:
Consistent learning experience – the e-Learning initiative has cost-effectively and efficiently ensured a level of consistency and structure to ICON’s overall training efforts in all global regions.
Reduction of the administrative burden – ICON’s reliance on paper has been greatly reduced. They estimate that the volume of paper generated to support training documentation today is only 3% of what it was before they introduced the TopClass e-Learning system. Instructor-led training scheduling and participation is more efficiently managed by the training department.
Employees are empowered to take ownership of their own training – TopClass puts learning into the hands of the employees. They can see their learning plans, know what courses need to be taken and can self-register. They can take more courses at a time and place that suits them which resolves the issue of time zones for a large part of their training.
On demand access to training compliance information – TopClass gives the employees, their management and the training department the ability to view training compliance at an employee level at any time. Further, TopClass reporting provides the ability to generate overall compliance and gap analysis information across employee groups, departments, divisions and regions.
Procedure, policy and training recertification scheduling – TopClass allows ICON to set reviews of procedures and policies and other re-certifications in the system so that the system automatically applies it back to an employee’s learning plan per the schedule without manual intervention by training staff.
What our customer said
“The benefits that TopClass has delivered to ICON have been significant. One example is our reduced dependency on paper. We have estimated that the volume of paper generated for training documentation today is only 3% of what it was before we implemented TopClass.”
Anne Wesler, VP Training and Development, ICON Clinical Research
1-877-WBT-7700
