Success Profile

Tenaris Luxembourg, Argentina www.tenaris.com The main benefit of the SumTotal solution is that it supports an all-encompassing infrastructure that integrates the whole learning management spectrum, incorporating everything from e-learning to classroom learning and from short-term to long-term training. Carlos Saggio Co-ordinator of Learning Technologies

Improving the Flexibility of Learning Management to Expand its Reach and Meet Corporate Training Objectives
INCREASE FLEXIBILITY AND EXPAND REACH
Picture an oil refinerys pipes, or an offshore oil rig with thousands of feet of tubing, or a natural gas pipeline laid across miles of countryside. Those pipes and tubing most likely come from Tenaris, whose customers include most of the worlds leading oil and gas companies as well as engineering companies engaged in constructing oil and gas gathering, transportation and processing facilities. It is unusual for an organization operating in the steel and energy industries to compete around knowledge and aptitude rather than cost, but Tenaris believes that knowledge capture and training is key for its competitive strategy. In line with this remarkably progressive and forward thinking about learning management, Tenaris established a corporate university, TenarisUniversity, to integrate, align and disseminate knowledge across the company. TenarisUniversitys core activity is training, offering a variety of curricula with specific mixes of courses customized to fit the needs of employees at every stage of their careers. These courses mix e-learning and on-site classroom teaching with off-site training, through agreements with universities and providers. The curricula are rolled out to employees and contractors depending on job profile and career plan. TenarisUniversity manages all Tenaris training in all regions and for all employees regardless of their organizational level or specialization. Its activities include knowledge management through the Tenaris intranet, selecting employees to participate in external degree and non-degree programs, and coordinating all of the companys initiatives in the field of education. This latter function included projects that provide support to academic universities and their students. Tenaris used a learning management system (LMS) for e-learning courses. However, issues increased over time with the scalability of the system and its inability to create complex curricula. TenarisUniversity realized that it needed to find a more scalable LMS to act as a platform for its training model. Another objective was to integrate the universitys formal training with informal training located in the companys intranet and containing community sites and personal sites. TenarisUniversity wanted to be able to present an infrastructure to the employee that would allow them the choice of visiting either the formal learning environment

Fast Facts
Industry: Industrial Manufacturing Country: Argentina Users: 25,000+ SumTotal Product: SumTotal Learning

www.sumtotalsystems.com

BUSINESS CHALLENGES

Roll out complex curricula across

global offices

or informal learning locations within the intranet. We want to give our employees as much flexibility and choice as possible in the way they approach their learning, said Carlos Saggio, co-ordinator of learning technologies at TenarisUniversity. This flexibility had to also extend to the ability to modify courses to reflect the local needs of offices in different countries. We needed a global best practice model delivered from Argentina and rolled out across the worldwide offices, explained Saggio, but we also needed to ensure that we could adapt it to meet the specific needs of the individual countries. The need to roll out learning management internationally meant that the chosen system had to handle and support a broad range of languages from English to Italian and from Spanish to Romanian. A further important challenge for TenarisUniversity was the need to accommodate both internal and external audiences of the LMS. The company employs a significant number of contractors who dont have access to the internal intranet for security reasons, but who still require training and certification through TenarisUniversity.

Expand the reach of training to

external contractors

Manage the complete spectrum of

methodologies

training from e-learning to classroom

Integrate informal and formal learning Improve flexibility and ease of

learning management SOLUTION

Tenaris chose SumTotal Learning

Management as a platform of training initiatives and to administer a variety of learning activities for both internal and external audiences

SCALABLE LEARNING MANAGEMENT PLATFORM

Before choosing SumTotal Learning Management, TenarisUniversity first had to decide whether to implement a training module as an extension of its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system from SAP, or to install a completely new LMS. The main factor in this decision was the user experience. Employees would typically have to use the system on a daily basis, so it needed to be both easy to use and highly mature and robust. TenarisUniversity decided that a new LMS would be more likely to meet its requirements in these respects. Next, it had to decide which LMS to implement. This decision was based on the products roadmap, together with its flexibility in offering different levels and types of training, and its support for a diverse global operation. SumTotal Learning Management scored highly in all these respects. TenarisUniversity was particularly impressed with the flexibility and scalability of the SumTotal solution and its ability to securely manage the training requirements of both internal staff and external contractors, as well as to support the broad range of languages required for an international roll-out. One great benefit of Learning Management with regard to its training model is the transparency and ease-of-use that was lacking in the companys previous system. With transparency, managers can see the curricula assigned to each student and the progress each student is making. Employees and managers can now easily drill down to rapidly review progress in individual subjects and e-learning and classroom training courses. Also unlike the previous LMS, SumTotal Learning Management enables Tenaris University to ensure that employees can access their own curricula whenever required and from wherever they are, and to highlight classroom discussions that take place in each individual country. Learning Management also enables the company to extend training, with adequate security, to external contractors as well as internal staff. In rolling out the complex mix of curricula and courses to employees, the flexibility and adaptability of the system are key advantages. By using SumTotals Open Activity Architecture, TenarisUniversity now has the freedom to create its own specially designed learning activity structure and adapt this structure as needed. SumTotal Learning Management also supports ease of integration with other technologies. At TenarisUniversity Learning Management integrates with the existing SAP ERP infrastructure, enabling the mapping of personnel location, job roles, and other relevant employee information between the learning and ERP environments.

RESULTS

Enables the company to meet its core

learning objectives

Boosts the Training Index and other

key learning metrics

Enables employees to access curricula

securely anytime and from anywhere self-registration and approval processes

Encompasses e-learning, classroom Provides a dashboard for reporting

training information to managers

Enables the rollout of global best

practices to extend training reach

Builds talent for dynamic business growth

www.sumtotalsystems.com

About SumTotal
SumTotal 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 industry 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 performance of the worlds 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 (866) 768-6825 (US / Canada), +1 (352) 264-2800 (international) or visit www.sumtotalsystems.com

TenarisUniversity is now focused on finding ways to use Learning Management to integrate the completely different world of informal learning sources such as discussions with colleagues, checking presentations and calling subject experts with its formal learning infrastructure. The challenge is to capture the knowledge conveyed in the informal world without interrupting or interfering with the interactions carried out in this environment. The company has already begun to tackle this issue by integrating Learning Management with Microsoft SharePoint, a content management system with integrated search functionality developed by Microsoft that allows users to work in a Web-based collaborative environment. It further hopes to work alongside SumTotal as its trusted partner to further address these challenges.

MEETS CORE OBJECTIVES AND BUILDS TALENT

The SumTotal Learning Management implementation has made a strategic impact on TenarisUniversitys Training Index metric. The Index measures the proportion of working hours the companys employees spend on training, and now shows an increasingly positive trend. This is important to TenarisUniversity and Tenaris as a whole because it demonstrates that the company is meeting its core learning objectives for both office and factory floor staff. For both groups, training is seen as key in helping to build talent through personal development and the latter must, by contract, have a certain specified number of hours of development. Tenaris office employees spent 3.5 percent of their working time on training in the 2008-2009 financial year, up from 3.1 percent in the previous year. Factory floor employees are spending 2.2 percent of their time on training, up from 1.4 percent the year before. The number of classroom courses is also rising dramatically, up from 12 per year before 2006 to 113 per year in 2008-2009. And the number of proprietary e-learning courses has grown dramatically from 27 in 2007-2008 to 50 in 2008-2009. Significantly, the solution has increased response to training initiatives: in 2008 2009, 91 percent of Tenaris office staff and 85 percent of factory floor staff received training. The main benefit of the SumTotal solution is that it supports an all-encompassing infrastructure which integrates the whole learning management spectrum, incorporating everything from e-learning to classroom learning, from short- to long-term training, said Saggio. The solution also encompasses self-registration, managerial approval processes and the possibility to show training information to managers as well as employees. We have even been able to use the system to create manager dashboards tied to key metrics. This kind of multidimensional capability is a huge advantage to us. TenarisUniversity is increasingly consolidating its global training activities by using Learning Management to incorporate best practices from local offices, and then roll these programs out on a global basis. The solution enhances collaboration between global headquarters and the local offices, and supports consistent global training, managed by TenarisUniversity in Buenos Aires but with sufficient flexibility and ease of use to ensure that local administrators also use it extensively. This flexibility is in striking contrast to the previous LMS, which had to be run in isolation at each country site because it did not scale effectively. Moving forward, the provision of high-quality training will increasingly be seen as a means of supporting the expansion and accelerating the integration of new companies acquired by Tenaris. Today, the company has more than 25,000 employees; up from the 15,000 it had just three years previously. Learning Management and the training it supports has played a key role in helping to assimilate this extra population.
APAC
SumTotal Systems India Pvt. Ltd. 7th Floor Maximus Towers Building 2B, Mind Space Raheja IT Park, Cyberabad Hyderabad, AP- 500081, India Phone: +91 (0) 40 6695 0000 Fax: +91 (0) 40 2311 2727 2012 SumTotal Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. SumTotal, and the SumTotal logo, are registered trademarks or trademarks of SumTotal Systems, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. 012_0113LS

About Tenaris
Based in Buenos Aries, Argentina, Tenaris is one of the leading worldwide manufacturers of steel pipes for the oil, gas and automotive industries with over $8 billion in sales in 2009. With an annual manufacturing capacity of six million tons of steel pipes, manufacturing facilities in 15 countries and R&D centres in four, it has an extensive global presence. Tenaris supplies a comprehensive range of high quality seamless and welded casing and tubing, drill pipe, premium connections, sucker rods and accessories for use in even the most demanding oil and gas drilling and well completion activities. TenarisUniversitys activities include knowledge management, selecting employees to participate in external degree and non-degree programs, and coordinating all of the companys initiatives in the field of education, such as projects that provide support to universities and students.
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