The Customer

The Siemens-Betriebskrankenkasse, or the SBK, is one of the largest health insurance providers for companies in Germany and one of the 20 largest national health insurance providers. More than one million insured customers rely on its expert advice, multi-award winning customer service, and excellent benefits. The SBK employs 1,500 people and has one thousand offices to maintain accessibility.

For over one hundred years, the people have been the SBK's main focus. The company supports its customers with any inquiries in relation to insurance, becoming healthy, and staying healthy. Many customers can confirm the help the SBK has given to them. The company reached first place in Germany's customer monitor in 2016 and has stayed highly ranked for over a decade. It placed third in "Germany's most popular legal health insurance" the year before and was among the top three award winners for the "customer service" category. The SBK also received the "German Fairness Prize" in 2016 for its reliability, transparency and pricing, and performance ratio.

For more Information, click here: https://www.sbk.org/en/

The Task

Linchpin Intranet on a Confluence Basis for About 1,600 Employees

SBK was already using Confluence. The idea of the new Linchpin intranet was to support the company in its planned cultural change. It was necessary to define steps that would improve collaboration, aside from the technical relaunch of the intranet. The focus was on promoting an open working culture and thus improving the ease-of-use of the system and minimizing the effort that users needed to spend to communicate wth each other. Another requirement was the standardization of the system in order to work with current versions quicker and to use new features.

The Solution

Design

This intranet is equipped with an individualized Confluence theme based on the corporate design of the company, and thus feels familiar to the employees. Additionally, various improvements were made in the usability and functionality of the standard Confluence interface, making the intranet as a work tool easy to use.

Global Navigation

Linchpin supports global navigation, which can be tailored to specific groups of employees. This helps make sure that the most important information is available with just one click.

Personalized App Center

From every webpage, employees can directly access all of the important applications and tools that are relevant to them in everyday work. The system is thus the central cockpit for the employees' daily tasks.

Extended User Profiles

The extension of user profiles were made to allow for expert searches. Employees can find each other more easily, connect with each other, and if necessary, find specialists to further help them with their projects.

Furthermore employees can start communicating via Skype for Business directly from the user profile. Users’ Messenger ID profile fields are linked with the Skype for Business account and Skype will open with a simple click on their Messenger ID.

News Channels

Company related news on the employees' home pages can be personalized to their roles and locations. Users can create their own customized news feeds from different news channels within the intranet – such as IT support, the employee blogs, etc. – to automatically provide themselves with a feed of interesting information and to stay up-to-date.

Project Implementation Method

In order to tailor the suite to meet the requirements, user-story workshops were carried out at the beginning of the project. Agile methods, iterative implementation and improvements as well as quick realization of the complete project led to the desired results.