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Pacific Life Re

Custom Intranet with SharePoint Integration

Pacific Life Re (PLRE), based in the City of London, are a specialist life reinsurer offering.

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Client Profile

Pacific Life Re (PLRE), based in the City of London, are a specialist life reinsurer offering a comprehensive range of solutions and support to insurance clients in the UK, Ireland, and a range of markets in Asia.

Aiming to give insurance providers a wider choice, greater flexibility and higher standards of support and technical expertise, they have built a strong experienced team and earned a reputation for technical excellence, responsiveness and innovation to their clients who include some of the UK’s leading insurance providers.

The Problem

PLRE were engaged in an internal transformation programme, which had identified a number of important issues that would need to be addressed to ensure a successful outcome to the project.

Top of the agenda was the management of documents around the business, where an unstructured approach had resulted inefficiencies. With a large number of departmental documents, including HR policies and procedures, freely circulating within local teams, publishing versioning, access control and full lifecycle management of the information was virtually impossible to maintain.

Secondly, PLRE wanted to develop and implement user-friendly administration processes to support holiday, sickness and study leave management. These absence management and reporting processes would need to be catered for and managed as part of the deployed solution.

PLRE had already identified that an Intranet would be the end solution and had a desire to utilise SharePoint (WSS – Windows SharePoint Services) as the framework. Since sections of the business were already acquainted with the application, the expectation was that the familiarity would help to increase user adoption. It was also important that the Intranet would reflect the company’s ethos, with the easy to access information and corresponding knowledgeshare helping to invoke a collaborative culture.

The Solution

BlackLight Software developed and deployed a solution that utilises Windows SharePoint Services as the engine. PLRE did not want to use SharePoint styling but wanted an open look and feel to increase usage, which was considered critical as the site had to deliver a positive user experience. To cater for this approach, BlackLight developed a new website as a flexible front end access point to the content and content control information held within SharePoint.

In taking this approach BlackLight developed both the SharePoint and front end website in a short timeframe; including the relevant workflows, security options and back office administration and control features for the Intranet.

The result is an Intranet with all the relevant document storage and management capabilities, access and security controls, and the workflows and data capture forms needed to enable the new HR processes.

PLRE use their SharePoint site to access and manage:-

All aspects of the Intranet content, document publishing and absence management and reporting are now managed in one place, using a standard interface and tools that are easy to customise and rapid to deploy.

The Benefits

PLRE now have a very successful and dynamic Intranet that has been well received and adopted by their employees.

Ownership of content is now managed across the business and departments that had poorly controlled, and effectively secret documents, can now share them securely with other teams at the click of a button.

The content ownership, as well as the expiry and notification features of the solution has helped enormously in keeping the Intranet relevant and it is now the first port of call for almost all general information.

The ease of access to correct and relevant documentation and the new absence management and reporting processes mean that PLRE are seeing an increase in productivity and a growing collaborative environment.