Corporate Project Solutions, a Microsoft SharePoint implementation specialist, has been appointed by BGL Group, one of the UK’s largest personal lines insurance intermediaries, which encompasses a number of well-known brands, such as comparethemarket.com with its famous meerkat marketing campaign.  CPS was selected to update BGL Group’s Intranet and offer employees a single, Microsoft SharePoint based digital workspace for staff to communicate and learn with each other across the different business units and locations. Corporate Project Solutions (CPS) also provided a platform for the senior management team to instantly communicate throughout the organisation.

BGL Group focuses carefully on its staff retention and work environments. Listed in 97th position in the 2009 Sunday Times Top Track 250 as one of the UK’s largest mid-market companies, it attributes its success to its ambitious and driven staff. In order to maintain staff motivation and create more open and informative working relationships within the group, BGL decided to appoint CPS to create a new and effective SharePoint Intranet that would ensure the right information was available to the right people at the right time.

BGL Group needed an intranet that would allow relevant information to be shared clearly between the large number of staff and business units which sit within the BGL Group, all of which have their own identity and separate internal departments within each site. Each department and division within BGL Group also needed to be able to feed information into a central communication area where BGL Group can share documents and announcements with all employees. CPS provided training onsite for all of the BGL Group staff including a site owner and content editor for each department. Online project management functionality was created for the IT department to monitor and record risks, issues and actions.

Peter Winslow, BGL Group Chief Executive, said: “We have been particularly impressed with CPS’ expert SharePoint knowledge, flexibility and capacity to come up with an Intranet system that was tailor-made for the BGL Group and its diverse business units. BGL Group is a leading player in the insurance industry and is spread across a number of sites in the UK and Cape Town, incorporating employees ranging from call centre personnel in the Fusion Contact Centre division to business development specialists working on joint ventures for our affinity partnerships at head office.”

Ivan Lloyd, Director at Corporate Project Solutions commented: “Our aim was to provide the maximum benefit from the minimum change; we developed a simple and clear SharePoint Intranet that has numerous benefits for BGL. As businesses constantly need to adapt to changing market conditions they are beginning to look very carefully at where they are spending money and if it is in line with business objectives. BGL clearly knew where it needed to focus its efforts and the planning and time it invested in researching this project has undoubtedly paid off.”

About BGL Group:

The BGL Group is a privately owned company and is one of the largest personal insurance brokers in the UK. It is made up of five trading divisions encompassing business-to-consumer (B2C) brands, products and services and also business-to-business (B2B) brands, products and services. It employs more than 2,270 people across five business divisions:

Frontline - motor, home, commercial vehicle and bike insurance. Frontline now incorporates Bennetts, the market-leading brand for bike insurance.

Junction - outsourcing services for major UK financial services and retail brands including Post Office®, Marks & Spencer Money, HSBC, RAC and Auto Trader.

Fusion - operational excellence delivered via BGL’s five contact centres.

comparethemarket.com - one of the UK’s top price comparison websites.

ACM ULR - claims and uninsured loss recovery services to all of the Group’s customers.

These divisions are supported by a number of key central functions – Audit, Legal & Compliance, Change Management, Finance, Product Development; HR, IT and Group Communications.