German Valo Partner GIS AG delivered Valo Intranet for BS PAYONE.
- Industry: Finance
- Country: Germany
- Company Size: Mid-Sized, 101-1000 users
- Year: 2016
The story behind
BS PAYONE makes card payments possible. As one of the leading service providers (belonging to the Sparkassen Finance Group) for card acceptance, BS PAYONE is striving every day to make cashless payments as easy, secure and transparent as possible and to set the course for the infrastructure and important services.
With more than 25 years of experience and around 250,000 customers, BS PAYONE is one of the most experienced and largest service providers for cashless payment solutions at POS, POI as well as in the internet and mail-order business.
In the meantime, the company employs about 500 people at different locations, which makes the communication increasingly complex.
In order to provide the customer with an optimal service throughout Europe, not only the communication to the outside plays an important role, but also the internal communication between the departments and teams. For this reason, the award-winning ready-to-go Valo Intranet was put to the test with GIS.
The initial situation
Let the employees have their say!
Agreed. That’s what BS PAYONE did. The employees were interviewed inside the company about their feelings of the previous intranet and wishes. The core abstracts briefly summarized:
- Search: Finding information is too complex
- Storage: Documents are distributed throughout the intranet
- Mobile: No mobile access possible
- Project work: No support in project work
The wishes of the employees & the requirements
“As a project team, we were given a lot of space to think about the intranet as a whole, compared to the previous solution. We started out on a green field to plan the new BS PAYONE intranet, initially conceptually and subsequently, together with GIS more practically.”
The project
The project group consisted of colleagues from various expertise areas. The different levels of experience with modern web solutions aroused different ideas and expectations for our new intranet. (…) The great freedom of the project team set us free with a lot of creativity and at the same time offered us a great deal of scope for the implementation. Ultimately, these expectations must also be brought into line with the budget and the schedule. The decisive factor, however, was that as a project group, we had to develop a common understanding of a new intranet. At first we had very different ideas and desires about the specific functions to the intranet platform.
The questions
Issues that had to be clarified at the beginning of the project were, for example:
- SOCIAL COLLABORATION
Should we build a classic intranet site with one-dimensional communication or a modern intranet for interactive communication and collaboration? - SOCIAL COMPONENTS
How many social components will the new intranet include? - FEATURES
What functions generate added value for the business? - ACCEPTANCE
How can employees be inspired to use the new intranet?
After discussing these points in the group in detail and forming a common direction, we were able to contact GIS with initial targets. From the consultants and solution architects at GIS, we received very detailed feedback on our ideas and were now able to plan the next steps together.
In retrospect, it can be said that as a project team, we have received great support in the further planning of our intranet from GIS. It is highly recommended to bring an experienced partner of the digital workplace and the topic of corporate intranet on board at an early stage. The expertise is a great benefit to the project, and functional requirements and design have been matched with the appropriate budget in a realistic timetable.
The set-up
On the basis of SharePoint 2016 and Valo Intranet, a new Intranet was specified and implemented for all BS PAYONE employees. The intranet includes the following components:
- Corporate and personalized news
- Multilingual support
- Approval & reminder workflows
- “About us” areas, enterprise-wiki
- Team, product & project workspaces
- Download area
- Optimized for mobile use
- Responsive design
Parallel to the development, a high-availability SharePoint infrastructure was set up and commissioned in to the BS PAYONE data center.
Success factors
- Project Team Training
- Key User Training & End User Training
- Training community
- Video Learning
Social learning for employee motivation
- To all employees of the B + S with the new function the course content was also taught and delivered on site, in the form of a key user concept, as well as in video productions.
Project progress
- The project kick-off lasted eight months, starting with the waterfall model
The new Intranet
When working with GIS we appreciated the direct and fast exchange. Change requests for the desired functions were taken into consideration at short notice. GIS is not only a technical service provider for the design and programming of websites, but also has a great deal of methodological competence in the recording of customer requirements and in the area of change and the change process. GIS has supported us very well with a training concept for all employees.
Valo Intranet is the most advanced ready-to-go intranet on the market and a pioneer in the digital work environment. You can choose Valo Intranet either as a Microsoft Office 365 cloud service or installed to the local on premises servers. We would be more than happy to guide you through all those new experiences.
