Bajaj Finserv Chooses Acuvate’s Mesh On SharePoint Online As Their New Intranet Platform To Provide An Engaging Digital Employee Experience Platform For Their Employees.
Bajaj Finserv, a part of Bajaj Holdings & Investments Limited, is an Indian financial services company focused on lending, asset management, wealth management and insurance.
The company employs over 20,000 employees at 1400 locations, and is engaged in consumer finance businesses, life insurance, and general insurance. Apart from financial services, Bajaj Finserv is also active in wind–energy generation.
As a part of Bajaj Finserv Limited (BFL) Digital transformation journey, BFL were looking at creating a brand new, secure and collaboration platform leveraging their existing Investment in Office 365.
In 2013, Bajaj Finserv Ltd launched the first version of their Intranet, Ulive, which functioned as a broadcast platform to ensure that the content posted by businesses/functions reaches all the employees through the sites and its stimulation plan. Ulive was designed as a content display and an engagement module, to create a central repository for all policies and guidelines along with catering to a few engagement activities likes HR contests.
With constant learning and requirement from businesses, Ulive was made richer with capabilities like:
- social features like share, congratulate
- stimulation elements like promotional tile, team alerts
- critical modules like TuneIn – the digital company magazine,
- call a cab for women,
- Employee Education Program,
- Project Tracker to name a few.
In 2014, to ensure the design is refreshed, a need for rehashed Ulive was initiated with the focus on better visibility and discoverability with a new renewed design for homepage.
Know How Acuvate Solved This Challenge
In 2016, to provide a better experience for employees- UI and UX led to launching Ulive 3.0, to reduce operational dependencies and a view towards de-centralization. This version was also investigated for two-way interaction with launching of features like comments, like, favorite, subscriptions and much more
Ulive journey has been as-long-as 4 years and presently Acuvate is working along with BFL to launch the new version named Ulive Reloaded / Open / Mesh.
The challenge that the customer was experiencing prior to implementing our Mesh solution challenges like:
- The most important to reduce environmental infrastructure cost as previous version Ulive 3.0 was built in SharePoint on-prem 2013 and cost was increasing every year
- The active user count was going down due to poor user experience and interface, not user friendly. Also, users were unable to access by mobile.
- They want more employee engagement through communicating, collaboration
- They were looking for quick, simple, and effortless approach to build insights and perspective.
- Their main objectives were Mobile first approach, Gamification, Better discoverability, Real time feed and Program management.
Summary
Bajaj Finserv Ltd (BFL) serves independently in Non-banking Finance services (NBFS) sector and runs the core businesses of Lending, Protection, and savings. BFL is the holding company for the businesses dealing with financial services of the Bajaj Group. It serves millions of customers in the financial services space by providing solutions for asset acquisition through financing, asset protection through general insurance, family protection and income protection in the form of life and health insurance and retirement and savings solutions.
During the year under review, Bajaj Finserv Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary, has firmed up new business plans for undertaking activities on digital and online platform to augment the business of the Company’s subsidiaries. BFL were planning to roll out a Digital Experience platform with the following features:
- Functions as communicating, collaboration and engagement tool
- Provides quick access to information in the company
- Quick, simple, and effortless approach to build insights and perspective.
- Makes all content available on single platform and ensures transparency
- Meets their objectives like Mobile first approach, Gamification, Better discoverability, Real time feed and Program management.
Acuvate provided the enriched O365 based Intranet Application (Mesh 2.0) with different features for Communication, Collaboration, Social, Authoring and more. Mesh also leverages Cognitive, AI and ML services in Microsoft Azure to bring in intelligent experiences for the user.
Our Clients
“iDeas Innovation was a great success for Bajaj. The employee participation was great, of course prize money was involved. The platform has help Bajaj consolidate and track all ideas from different department on one single interface for HR to manage it properly.”
– Arun Laskar, IT Manager, Bajaj Finserv Limited (BFL)
Solution
BFL needed to build this platform on Office 365 and Yammer for all collaboration features. Acuvate evaluated the fitment of this platform, and in collaboration with Microsoft concluded that Yammer, in its current form, is not suitable. Acuvate proposed a hybrid architecture that integrates O365 and ELK stack along with NoSQL principles on SQL Server to build a highly responsive & performant platform. Some of Solution Highlights as below:
- Elastic Search and Logstash to power the middle tier to support large collaboration content that is expected to be generated
- Front-end of the platform to be built using SharePoint SPFx and Angular2.0, and hosted on O365
- Back end implemented using SQL Server NoSQL JSON database
Acuvate introduced the implementation of Mesh – Next Gen Intelligent Intranet to Bajaj Finserv as an opportunity to provide BFL digital transformation intranet tool. Mesh is an Intranet Accelerator solution using which organizations can get started with their Intranet Journey. It comes with a host of different features for Communication, Collaboration, Social, Authoring and more. Mesh can also leverage Cognitive, AI and ML services in Microsoft Azure to bring in intelligent experiences for the user. In this proposal, we presented the features of Mesh, technical details and pricing models for Bajaj Finserv. Mesh as an Intranet Accelerator solution. It’s a ready to use intranet that can be deployed on Office 365 SharePoint Online. It leverages all the features of SharePoint online for communication and collaboration features and the social features.
Basically, the Mesh intranet tool provides BFL a platform which acts as center to employee world in office, makes all content available on single platform, makes connecting with peers easy, believes in transparency which meets their objectives like
- Mobile first approach
- Gamification
- Better discoverability
- Real time feed
- Program management
Technologies Used
Office 365
SharePoint Online
Azure Search
Elastic Search
Logstash
Azure SQL
Microsoft Flow
Azure Active Directory
Azure App Services.
Microsoft Bot Framework.
Microsoft LUIS
Results
Approximately 25,000 BFL employees are using Intranet application for their engagement activities. This solution has resulted into:
- Highly optimized performance
- Ease of use
- Enhanced productivity
- Superior employee engagement and content management in workbench
- Employee engagement and collaboration
- Mobile first approach
- Real time feed etc.
Experience The Power Of Mesh
