Employee portal for mandatory accident insurance in Switzerland
Project description
Suva is the largest accident insurance provider in Switzerland. As an independent public insurer, Suva provides around 115,000 businesses and two million employed and unemployed persons insurance coverage against the effects of accidents and occupational illnesses. Suva’s service portfolio comprises prevention, insurance, claims management and rehabilitation.
The Swiss company entrusted the BTEXX business technologies consulting group with the new design of their company employee portal.
The new employee portal, called “piazza”, is the result of a complete intranet relaunch: Suva decided to implement a new technological platform, the SAP NetWeaver Portal, and a powerful WCM system for enterprise portals, BTEXX easyWCM. The software from BTEXX allows Suva to provide content and applications quickly and easily via the intranet.
The Swiss design agency “Unic” delivered comprehensive design guidelines for the Suva employee portal and provided an information and navigational structure concept.
“We found the staff at BTEXX to be highly customer-focused and business-oriented consultants who quickly familiarized themselves with the task at hand and offered fresh ideas and solution approaches.” Beat Künzli, responsible for the Suva intranet
Concept
The intranet relaunch was designed to give Suva employees a new and efficient working platform to help them find information quickly. An internal survey conducted before work on the project began, indicated that the former intranet solution’s content, navigation and access structure needed to be completely revised.
Even in the design phase, emphasis was placed on enabling employees to structure and prioritize information themselves. For instance, the new Suva intranet features a customizable sidebar: Here employees can choose the relevant content from a range of ready-made news items, widgets and applications and arrange the information in order of importance.
Collaborative scenarios were designed to facilitate information exchange between Suva employees on the intranet. The “Marketplace” is similar to a bulletin board on the intranet and offers a practical method of implementing the idea of direct exchange: Portal users can place personal ads here, sort the hit list according to different criteria, and directly contact the person making the offer if desired.
Design
The design and usability of the new Suva intranet make accessing the system simple and easy to understand. The Swiss online marketing agency “Unic” provided a uniform design grid. A variety of different page types were developed to give the portal a consistent appearance. Comprehensive design guidelines were defined and implemented in the SAP NetWeaver Portal with pixel-precise accuracy.
The employee portal’s modern, yet timeless design fostered employee acceptance of Suva’s “piazza” intranet to such a degree that over 300 attractively designed content pages had already been created in the first few weeks of the project.
The easy operation of the user interface, the global search for content and individuals and the option for all employees to play an active role in design helped create an overall concept that puts the user first. The intranet supports the employees so efficiently that it enables them to handle workflows and processes much more rapidly and efficiently.
“The BTEXX easyWCM editor mode’s intuitive interface enabled us to leave content editing for the intranet site completely in the hands of around 50 employees from a variety of different user departments. Within just a few months, these editors were able to design over 300 attractive, multi-language pages, which helped cover a broad range of topics and generate a high level of user acceptance for their intranet site.” Thomas Wohlwend, Manager of UI & Collaboration, Suva
Technology
BTEXX developed a range of portal applications for the Suva intranet that are custom tailored to meet Suva employee needs. For example, a multipage global search was introduced to make it easier to find information. This means that content can either be found directly on the page or globally – across the entire intranet. A global “people search” in the intranet header also offers full text search capability for personal information such as the name, position, department, telephone number, etc. of the individual being searched.
The “BTEXX easyWCM” Web content management system is used to simply generate and organize content within the Suva employee portal. Editors consider the implementation of this software to be one of the major technical highlights of the intranet relaunch. Generating content is not the only thing that is fast and intuitive; managing documents is also convenient thanks to the BTEXX documentManager.
