340,000 employee claims every year for work-related injuries and disabilities. Information locked in many legacy systems built on different platforms and stovepiped in Lotus Notes databases across the organization. Employees tied to a paper-heavy and process-heavy system. Customers demanding almost instantaneous answers and actions. This was the situation facing a leading Canadian Insurance company.

Corporate management knew and understood the problem. So they hired PPC to implement a B2E portal solution. The solution required obtaining buy-in from staff, technical understanding of diverse applications and databases, and an easy-to-implement training solution.

Using meetings, interviews, surveys and focus groups, the PPC team worked closely with our client on two levels: identifying the content they needed within the portal to create a taxonomy that made functional and organizational sense; and educating them about portal use and best practices. This began a major cultural shift for an organization that did not yet have a web-enabled intranet.

To power the Portal, PPC customized, developed, and rolled out the Plumtree platform. The software automated searching across the many Lotus Notes databases and reading the specific metadata fields. Now documents are searchable against the metadata as well as full-text searches.

PPC also provided the necessary training to make the staff “web-savvy.” Now all employees have individual startup pages that they can customize to meet their job needs. From this single page, each employee can access a wide range of job-related information (e.g., forms, claims files, firm directories, online courses and training materials, health-related information) and any job-related system (e.g., HR, financial, corporate administration) regardless of the platform on which it resides.

While the portal itself did not guarantee faster claim processing, better customer service, and more productive employees, it did put into place a infrastructure where these goals are being achieved.

TOOLS
Plumtree 4.0 Corporate Portal
Microsoft Active Server Pages
Microsoft Internet Information Services
Microsoft SQL Server 7
Microsoft Visual Studio
Microsoft Windows 2000 server