Dow Chemical wins CIO magazine award

Dateline: 1 March 2002

CIO Magazine has announced that The Dow Chemical Company has won their prestigious Enterprise Value Award for their in-house e-Learning system. This system, Learn@dow.now, is a visionary, enterprise-wide, global implementation of WBT System's TopClass™ e-Learning suite.

Learn@dow.now is an e-Learning implementation on an unprecedented scale. CIO Magazine said: "Dow conducts more than one million hours of regularly required training for its 60,000 users at plants around the world..[delivering]..courses that range from cost accounting and business ethics to chemistry and hazardous materials handling - each one of which is offered in Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish (with some available in Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese and Thai)."

As the article in CIO Magazine also states "By the end of its first year, the company was delivering 98 course titles and had recorded 24,492 course completions. In 2000, the system was offering 426 course options and boasted 208,464 completions. Nothing had been seen on this scale in e-Learning before." This year the number of courses is more than 500 and the course completions for 2001 totalled 370,000 for Dow employees and contractors.

"What won them the award was the scale of the system," explained CIO Enterprise Value Award judge John Glaser, vice president and CIO of Partners HealthCare System in Boston. "The sheer number of classes that they've offered and the number of people that have been trained are remarkable."

"TopClass provided us with the tools to easily create, deploy and manage our complex set of e-Learning programs and large user base. But more than this, TopClass allows us to provide powerful online assessments and a complete audit trail for regulatory compliance training and certification. The openness of the system was also key as it made it easy to integrate with our existing infrastructure including PeopleSoft HRMS as well as allowing us to buy learning content off the shelf, build content in-house and have content created specifically for Dow by third party vendors." said Jon Walker HR IT Global Leader at Dow.

To read the full CIO Magazine article about Dow Chemical's award winning TopClass™ e-Learning implementation please visit http://www.cio.com/archive/020102/dow.html.

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