Sumtotal Wins Astd Excellence in Practice Award

SumTotal® Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: SUMT), the market leader and global provider of talent development solutions, today announced that the company was selected as a 2007 ASTD Excellence in Practice Award Winner for their internal use of the SumTotal Unified Talent Development Suite. Using this solution, SumTotal realized a 75% increase in new hire ramp times and a 73% increase in retention.

The ASTD Excellence in Practice Awards program recognizes organizations for results achieved through learning and performance practices and solutions. They are presented to organizations with proven practices that meet a demonstrated need, have appropriate design values, are aligned with other performance improvement initiatives and deliver clear and measurable results.

“While we are a leader in talent development solutions, we also want to implement the competencies that drive employee engagement and customer satisfaction,” says project leader Dawn Cassidy, Sr. Director of Talent Management and TotalUniversity at SumTotal. “Together with our business teams, we worked to understand the business problems and the ideal processes. Once the framework was built, we implemented our own technology with no customization, including the ability for managers to do employee assessments offline during air travel and from remote parts of the world with no sacrifice in capabilities. Our technology streamlined the assessment process giving managers more personal interaction time with employees and creating more engagement.”

“We were focused on the end results and reports allowed us to isolate individual performance and team performance across geographical regions and departments. Managers identified critical skill gaps and were given the ability to mitigate with training, mentoring and on-the-job training. In addition, we could identify promotion readiness and identify top performers for succession planning,” added Cassidy. “Based on our success, we are sharing what we learned with our customers.”

“I speak for the company in offering congratulations to Dawn and her team,” says Don Fowler, SumTotal’s chief executive officer. “Dawn had to go through the same process that many of our customers must do – understand a critical business issue and how talent and employee performance can improve the opportunity in tangible, business results. Our focus internally on customer satisfaction is also a reflection of our focus on our customers’ business results and opportunities.”

Dawn Cassidy and John Hinds will be presenting at the ASTD 2008 International Conference & Expo in San Diego, CA on Wednesday, June 4 from 1:15 pm - 2:45 pm. For more information on SumTotal’s program, including templates and recorded webcast, are available in a SumTotal Talent Management Toolkit at http://www.sumtotalsystems.com/lp/talent_toolkit_tm.html.