8/3/2019 Cegos Case Study: How SumTotal Helped Cegos Become a Leader in E-learning and Blended Learning Marketplace

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Success Profile

Working with SumTotal® has enabled Cegos

to transform its business model. From a

standing start just two years ago, it has already

succeeded in migrating 50% of its total

training business to an e-learning or blended

learning approach. 

Fast Facts

Industry: Education

Country: France

Users: 200,000+

SumTotal Product:

SumTotal Learning

The Cegos Group

Berkshire RG12 1BW, UKwww.cegos.co.uk

How SumTotal Helped Cegos

Become a Leader in E-learning

and Blended Learning Marketplace

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Founded in 1926, the Cegos Group is Europe’s largest learning and development

company, providing customised and ‘off-the-shelf’ training solutions to some of the

world’s leading blue-chip, public sector, and SME organisations.

With the rapid advance in training technology over recent years and in online

solutions in particular, Cegos has recently decided to focus its efforts around

blended learning, a flexible approach that combines traditional face-to-face

teaching methods with online training techniques.

In rolling out this strategy, Cegos has become increasingly conscious of the need

to choose a flexible third party platform through which it could provide its entire

e-learning and blended learning portfolio. The company is aware that e-learningand blended learning are effectively still in their infancy, that they are likely to

undergo major changes over the coming years and that today’s training systems

are becoming more process-based, encompassing disparate elements like career 

development and skills specifications, for example, rather than simply providing

training. In such a fluid and fast moving environment, it is essential that Cegos

retains its freedom of choice.

Cegos also needed to ensure that by passing over responsibility for technology

management to the experts, it is able to remain fully focused on its core business

of training solutions provision and that the technology behind this remains

transparent to customers.

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Cegos’ first key decision was to opt for a third party platform rather than a proprietary

solution. It did this primarily because it wanted to maintain flexibility and freedom of 

choice over the long term. However, pursuing this approach would also give Cegos

the opportunity to hand over the management of the system to its technology solutions

partner and focus its attentions on its core business.

8/3/2019 Cegos Case Study: How SumTotal Helped Cegos Become a Leader in E-learning and Blended Learning Marketplace

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BUSINESS CHALLENGES

■■To keep pace with the rapid change in

e-learning and blended learning

■■To focus on educational side of the

business

■■To ensure the technology supporting

business offering remains transparent

to customers

■■To develop content to populate any

e-learning platform

SOLUTION

■■ Cegos chose to implement SumTotal

Learning Management together withassociated authoring tools, skills

management modules and training

administration solutions as its

e-training platform. The application is

hosted online in a SaaS configuration.

Cegos subscribes to the service, only

paying for what it uses

RESULTS

■■ Cegos now widely seen as an

innovator in e-learning and blended

learning with the best catalogue on

the market

■■ Cegos has succeeded within twoyears of implementing the system

in migrating 50% of its total training

business to an e-learning or blended

learning approach

■■ Use of the SumTotal solutions has

enabled Cegos to penetrate new

markets – like Russia and Chile

■■The new system has allowed Cegos

to obtain easy access to high-quality

solutions from SumTotal’s partners

■■The new capability opens up

new partnership opportunities for 

SumTotal

To help it choose between available offerings, Cegos developed a strict project

specification. As Laurent Moresco, director of e-services at Cegos, states: “First, we

had to make sure that we selected a working solution that could support our entire

training portfolio, encompassing distance learning, classroom based learning and our 

trademark Global Learning by Cegos, a leading method of multimodal training.”

The second key requirement was that Cegos required a software-as-a-service (SaaS)

solution. This approach would mean that the application would be hosted online.

Cegos would subscribe to the service and only pay for what it actually used.

The solution also had to have a flexible infrastructure, allowing it to be easily

customised to support the full range of content Cegos customers need today as well

as the solutions they are likely to demand in the future. It was critical that the solution

chosen had this future-proofing capability. The e-learning and blended learning

markets are currently in a rapid development phase and it is difficult to predict their 

likely future growth paths. Consequently, Cegos was clear that it needed a system that

was flexible and functionally rich enough to adapt quickly to change.

Finally, Cegos was looking for a long term solutions partner who understood the

French market and its prevailing business culture.

SumTotal fulfilled all these criteria. Not only was its learning management solutions

offering ideally suited to Cegos’ needs but with 1500 corporate customers served by

850 employees, its international network enables it to work with Cegos and its clients

all over the globe. SumTotal has a strong presence in France, in particular, where

many of its customers are based and where it has successfully developed its own

ecosystem of hosting, technology and solutions partners.

So Cegos took the decision to install the SumTotal Learning Management complemented

by authoring tools, skills management modules and solutions specifically designed for 

training course administration.

In terms of system configuration, Cegos has followed the classic SaaS model where

servers, applications and data are all hosted externally, providing greater levels

of guarantee in terms of security and continuity of service. Once the contract with

SumTotal had been signed, it was just a few weeks before the system was fully

installed and operational, although Cegos still lacked sufficient training content to

populate the new platform. After eighteen months of intensive content development, it

now has 200 e-learning modules in 13 different languages available on the platform.

Cegos customers’ can pick and choose suitable modules to use, as and when required.

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Thanks to SumTotal, Cegos is now widely seen as an innovator in this sector with

the best e-learning and blended learning catalogue on the market. Working with

SumTotal has enabled Cegos to transform its business model. From a standing

start just two years ago, it has already succeeded in migrating 50% of its totaltraining business to an e-learning or blended learning approach.

The ability to make use of the SumTotal platform has also allowed Cegos to

penetrate new geographical markets. Since partnering with SumTotal, it has won

new business in both Russia and Chile, two country markets which would have

proved difficult to break into without the SumTotal platform.

8/3/2019 Cegos Case Study: How SumTotal Helped Cegos Become a Leader in E-learning and Blended Learning Marketplace

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About SumTotalSumTotal Systems, Inc. is the global leader 

strategic Human Capital Management

(HCM) solutions that provide organizations

with a new level of visibility to help make

more informed business decisions and

accelerate growth. Recognized by indus-

try analysts as the most complete solution,

SumTotal provides full employee lifecycle

management, including a core system of 

record, from a single provider for improved

business intelligence. The company offers

customers of all sizes and industries the

most flexibility and choice with multiple

purchase, configuration, and deployment

options. We have increased the perfor-

mance of the world’s largest organizations

including Sony Electronics (NYSE: SNE),

AstraZeneca (NYSE: AZN [ADR]; London:

AZN), Amway (KUL:AMWAY), Seagate

(NYSE: STX), Dell (NASDAQ:DELL), and

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG). For more

information, or to request a demo, please

call +1 (800) 881-2546 (US / Canada),

+1 (508) 358-1072 (international) or visit

www.sumtotalsystems.com

About Cegos GroupFounded in 1926, the Cegos Group is

Europe’s largest learning and development

company, providing customised and ‘off-

the-shelf’ training solutions to some of the

world’s leading blue-chip, public sector,

and SME organisations. It employs more

than 1,200 staff worldwide and has an

annual turnover of 300 million CHF. In

2007, the Cegos Group trained 200,000

professionals in 50 countries.

Equally the use of the platform has made Cegos a more attractive proposition

for global enterprises with a presence in underdeveloped territories or emerging

markets around the world. And as a result of deploying the SumTotal platform,

Cegos has been able to expand several existing relationships with multinational

customers.

In addition, the fact that the SumTotal solutions are both flexible and functionally

rich has enabled Cegos to implement new functionality as and when requested by

customers. It plans to start deploying SumTotal’s skills specifications management

tool which includes a skill levels certification module shortly.

The use of a SaaS model helps Cegos to make changes to the solution and

implement new modules, for example, quickly and easily – and the ability to host

hundreds of customers on a single platform has resulted in significant savings in

administrative costs.

It is important to note however, that Cegos remains responsible for the functional

administration of the system. A large company that wishes to re-engineer its

training plan in order to implement blended learning can turn to Cegos to analyse

and implement its corresponding functional separation completely transparently

on the SumTotal platform. In addition, Learning Management already has all the

necessary connectors to connect to the HR information and ERP systems that its

customers are using.

This is a significant advantage for large organisations that use these types of 

information system. Once Cegos has completed the configuration process, no

more than two people are typically required to manage the back office training,

even in the largest companies. This represents a massive reduction on traditional

cost levels and is achievable because the other services required to operate the

platform are all included in the SaaS subscription.

Cegos has also benefited from SumTotal’s ability to integrate high-quality third-

party solutions into its platform to add value, such as the test authoring tool,Questionmark, which Cegos also uses, and virtual classroom software such as

Interwise, Adobe Connect and Webex.

As Moresco explains, “With the broad spectrum of functionality now supported by

these platforms, we can foresee a situation in the long term where large training

companies like Cegos could partner corporations in all areas relating to skills and

training, including management.”

 

Next Steps 

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