Credit Suisse Selects TopClass as Corporate e-Learning Solution
Credit Suisse Financial Services has chosen the TopClass
e-Learning Suite as their corporate
e-Learning solution. This enterprise-wide contract follows a successful three-year deployment at Credit Suisse Private Banking where TopClass was used to deliver online learning to 8,500 employees. The initial focus of the expanded deployment is legal and compliance training to all 50,000 staff and sales training to the Group’s 4,000 strong sales team.
“Over the past three years we have enjoyed a very productive relationship with WBT Systems and their Swiss partner, Tertia Edusoft. TopClass is a comprehensive e-Learning Suite and WBT Systems’ services are top-notch,” said Anthony Cerquone, Head of Talent Development and Leadership Technology, Credit Suisse Financial Services. “We chose WBT Systems because of their understanding of our business. The commercial, competitive and regulatory environment that we play in is very complex and WBT Systems understand this. They are helping us to respond to these challenges with innovative solutions to cut costs and improve efficiency.”
Valero’s New TopClass System Provides Real Savings
Valero Energy Corporation, one of the top marketing and refining companies in the United States, has selected TopClass as its
e-Learning and content management solution for its retail marketing division. Valero has been utilizing the online system to disseminate information and to help train over 10,000 employees at its 1,400 retail stores. The system has been such a success, especially in terms of gaining efficiencies and reducing costs, that Valero is working with WBT Systems on plans to add several new training applications.
“We selected TopClass last year after conducting an extensive vendor review process and researching a number of content management and e-Learning solutions,” said Judy Grover-Allen, Valero’s Senior Manager of Retail Support Projects. “And, because of its ability to transfer a large volume of content quickly and in a standard format through the use of TopClass Publisher, we could deploy it quickly.” According to Grover-Allen, WBT System’s reputation for providing outstanding customer service also played a key factor in Valero’s selection. “Already, we have seen real savings in terms of dollars and time,” added Grover-Allen. “With the reduced printing and shipping costs alone, we have realized a 100 percent return on our first-year investment.”
Volvo CE Chooses TopClass to Deliver e-Learning Solution to Global Dealer Network
Volvo Construction Equipment (CE), one of the largest providers of construction equipment in the world, has selected TopClass as their global
e-Learning solution, to provide sales, service and product training to their worldwide dealer network. Volvo CE chose TopClass as their preferred
e-Learning solution following a successful pilot during which over 10,000 training courses were delivered to 1,000 learners around the world.
The initial results from the programme are very impressive, showing dealers who received training on TopClass in addition to a hands-on session increased their market share by over 30%. Also, the response to TopClass has been exceedingly positive from the dealer network, with students giving the solution 89% for ease of understanding and 91% for relevancy to their job. Over 60% of students gave TopClass 100% for relevancy. In the US, all new sales people and approximately 70% of the total retail sales staff are currently taking the training, which lasts on average six months. In addition to the dealer network, the new system is also being rolled out internally within Volvo CE to over 400 sales and marketing staff for regular product training.
“Sales training has always been a key priority for Volvo CE and our objective was to get the training to the right people and radically reduce the cost of training a new sales person. Using TopClass we were able to do this,” said George Lilly, VP Marketing, Volvo CE. “In addition, the relevancy and ease of understanding scores have really impressed us – 100% relevancy from 60% of the students is something I had never seen before. But the most important statistic is the 30% increase in market share for the dealers who received the web-based and hands-on training. By providing the dealers with relevant, easy to understand training, we have increased their knowledge of our product range and freed up their time to spend more time selling – making a material impact on their market share.”
WBT Systems Announces Launch of TopClass Compliance
WBT Systems recently announced the launch of a suite of products and services designed to lower costs, reduce risk and ensure compliance within regulated industries such as Financial Services, Healthcare and Pharmaceuticals. The flagship product in this new solution is TopClass Compliance, which is built on the award winning TopClass
e-Learning Suite.
"Companies are incurring ever increasing oversight from their regulators, and this has led to a huge training burden, which companies have no option but to deliver," commented Declan Kelly, CEO of WBT Systems. "Using traditional training methods which are slow and expensive most organisations simply do not have the capacity to meet this demand, along with the other training needs of the business. For some time now, regulatory compliance training has been identified as suitable for electronic delivery, but WBT Systems is the first company to develop a suite of functionality and services specifically to meet this need."
The TopClass Compliance Early Adopter Programme is now open, for more information email eap@wbtsystems.com
WBT Systems Drives Learning & Compliance in Healthcare
WBT Systems has recently announced a wide range of customer successes in the Healthcare Industry following a strong vertical strategy to deliver customised solutions to this industry. WBT Systems’ TopClass
e-Learning infrastructure software has been used by some of the largest Hospitals and Health Benefits Companies as well as individual Blue Cross and Blue Shield organisations in various US states. The TopClass
e-Learning solution for the Healthcare industry includes capabilities such as rapid deployment, easy content conversion, standards adherence and a comprehensive system for developing a robust, audit ready compliance training system.
WBT Systems has successfully delivered HIPAA training to numerous Healthcare organisations including two of the largest health benefits companies where TopClass has enabled them to provide training to over 40,000 staff. Each company was able to deliver over 50,000 hours of online training to approximately 20,000 users in 6 - 8 weeks. WBT Systems is also working with a number of hospitals, including the University of Chicago Hospitals (UCH), which have implemented TopClass to provide staff training.
WBT Systems Announces Major European Expansion
WBT Systems announced the opening of their new UK and German offices and several senior management appointments. The London office, located in New Bond Street will be managed by Tim Davies and will focus on business development and services activities supporting WBT's growing UK customer and partner base. This team is planned to grow to five staff by the end of the year. A similar team will focus on the German marketplace based out of Düsseldorf. This facility is headed up by Martin Saenger, Sales Manager for Central Europe.
WBT Systems is also pleased to announce the appointment of Tim Madeley as Vice President of Research and Development.
Techie Tip - Upgrading to TopClass 6.1.4
For users upgrading to TopClass 6.1.3 or TopClass 6.1.4 from an older version of TopClass 6.x.x, a newer version of Tomcat (version 4.1) is included in the release. Tomcat 4.1 is a refactoring of Tomcat 4.0.x, and contains significant enhancements, including:
- JSP and Struts based administration web application
- Performance and memory efficiency improvements
- Various bug fixes, particularly with reference to Siteminder integration.
For those users who are unfamiliar with setting up the Tomcat environment the following details may prove useful.
The Tomcat servlet container is used to manage and invoke Java servlets on behalf of users. A redirect specified through IIS provides seamless integration with the main TopClass application. Tomcat is installed if any of the modules that require it are selected as part of the install (AICC/Competencies/Catalog and Registration). Tomcat is installed to the default location of C:\TCC but this location may be altered if needed. For more information about Tomcat refer to http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/.
IIS will need to be configured to redirect requests with the JSP extension to Tomcat
for processing. Tomcat will then pass the results to IIS for delivery to the web
browser.
How to configure TCC on IIS
1. In the Internet Services Manager, edit the Properties of the Default Web Site.
2. Select the ISAPI-filters tab
3. Click Add.
4. Create a filter named jakarta with the path to the isapi_redirector2.dll in the
Executable field.
This is installed by default to the TopClass non-webable directory within the
tcc\iis\dll subdirectory.
5. Create a virtual directory named jakarta and set its path to the directory
containing the isapi_redirector2.dll .
6. Save your changes in the Internet Services Manager.
7. Restart your web server. If the web server is not restarted the changes will not take effect.
The installer will take care of setting the registry values for the Tomcat service however for the sake of completeness (and to aid in troubleshooting any potential problems with the TopClass/Tomcat communication structure) they are shown below….
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Apache Software Foundation\Jakarta Isapi Redirector\2.0]
"serverRoot"="\\tomcat"
"extensionUri"="/jakarta/isapi_redirector2.dll"
"log_file"="\\tomcat\\logs\\iis_redirect.log"
"logLevel"="DEBUG"
"workersFile"="\\tomcat\\conf\\workers2.properties"
