Fit for the future with CoreMedia and Formcentric

The Professional Association of Healthcare and Social Welfare Workers (BGW) is the statutory accident insurer in Germany for people working in healthcare and social services. Responsible for nearly nine million policyholders in more than 665,000 organizations, the BGW is one of Germany’s biggest professional associations. The BGW has been headquartered in Hamburg since 1947. Nationwide, the Association also maintains 12 offices throughout Germany.

The technical platform used for the former BGW website was GSB – the ‘Government Site Builder’. The GSB is the content management system used by the German Federal Administration and was originally based on the CMS solution from CoreMedia GmbH. Recent versions of the GSB had been moving away from the platform’s earlier technical base, so the BGW decided to ‘go to the source’ and leverage its existing CoreMedia know-how and expertise by migrating to the latest CoreMedia system. In addition, the Association’s website also needed a more up-to-date design as well as automated services in order to meet the needs of a modern, user-friendly website. Another aim was to restructure the content offered on the public-facing website and include more graphics so as to make the available information less text-heavy. The password-protected customer area ‘My BGW’ was also unable to keep pace with the constant stream of new requirements. Although this part of the website did offer seminar booking and media ordering services, the backend workflows were very complicated, with some of the steps in these processes being unable to be handled entirely online.

Accordingly, the relaunch aimed to create an informative and modern internet presence that would help its users find relevant content as quickly as possible. Webseite navigation also needed to be intuitive and responsive while meeting accessibility requirements in full. The key point of focus for the ‘My BGW’ customer portal was service provision, with all of the familiar features needing to be retained and improved. At the same time, new features, such as guidance questionnaires, needed to be integrated as flexibly as possible.

Anyone visiting the new BGW website will be struck by the versatile and responsive design it now features, which also adapts perfectly to use on mobile devices. With around 1,700 pages and articles, the website is a comprehensive source of information that is clearly structured and organized by relevant topics. The quick links on the home page take visitors to the services most frequently requested, such as forms for filling out or the Media Center. The various howto’s and backgrounders from the old site have also been reused and expanded to include new features, with a lot of content being rewritten from scratch. A user-friendly search in the header area gives visitors a quick way to find what they want on the website. A simple set of buttons is provided to filter search hits by articles, media, seminars, FAQs and more. Content can also be located quickly with the flyout navigation: clicking ‘Topics’ or ‘Service’ here generates a menu offering users a choice of all categories.

The password-protected ‘My BGW’ portal is also much-improved. The Formcentric form manager is now used as the platform for self-services and other features for logged-in members – the culmination of a huge effort by the Monday Consulting team, who customized countless Formcentric forms to match BGW’s process requirements. Booking and ordering processes have been automated, extended to include a wide range of checks and also integrated with third-party systems. BGW policyholders can also book multi-day seminars on the new website and are always presented with their local BGW office, thanks to the Formcentric-based regional validation service. Formcentric has also been used to optimise the media ordering process, with form-based calculations for guidance and recommendations also being improved. Linking the form manager to the various third-party systems used at BGW now guarantees the digital downstream processing of customer data, while enhancing the customer experience with faster turnarounds and greater transparency. The ‘My BGW’ portal is rounded off by a personal member area where users can bookmark companies, access seminar bookings or look up their order history. All in all, this is a coherent and well-designed model for effective customer relationships.

Monday Consulting helped the customer implement this project using the Kubernetes deployment platform. Within this containerized environment, the CoreMedia CMS can be run as a failure-tolerant and scalable system. This also allows additional components to be brought in as required, with deployments also being automated to ensure that customers do not experience any downtime on the front end. The resulting cloud infrastructure not only future-proofs the BGW website but also ensures a shorter time-to-market for new online business processes and functionality.

With its new website, the BGW can face the future with confidence. The fresh new design, advanced features and automated business processes all come together to produce a premium customer experience that ensures policyholders can get all of their inquiries resolved online. And it’s not just the users themselves who are impressed by the new website and the improvements made to the ‘My BGW’ customer area: a lot has also been done behind the scenes to help the editing team. Thanks to the CoreMedia Studio rollout, content managers at BGW now have an intuitive editing interface at their fingertips that truly simplifies their editing work. New content can be created just as easily as it can be integrated. Close cooperation on the part of Monday Consulting, which included hosted training sessions for key users, has ensured the successful transfer of both Formcentric know-how and CoreMedia expertise. As a result, the internal BGW dev team is now perfectly prepared to tackle the ongoing development of bgw-online as well as other projects in the future.