Penn National Insurance Provides Content Management Solution For Employees

Company
Penn National Insurance is a $1.1 billion regional, mutual, property-casualty insurance company. Headquartered in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, since its founding in 1919, the company underwrites a broad variety of business insurance categories and personal auto, homeowners, and umbrella insurance in nine states.

Challenge
When Penn National Insurance launched its corporate intranet, they had nearly 1,000 employees and five offices nationwide. To maintain the intranet, Penn National Insurance wanted the employees to be self-sufficient in maintaining the content. The decision was made to use Microsoft FrontPage, and department-based, non-technical staff had to learn FrontPage to publish their own sections of the site. However, since they had no global control, each departmental group had to rely upon themselves for direction of design, leaving little consistency across the departments. In addition, there was a general lack of willingness from the non-technical staff to learn FrontPage, so the number of content contributors was limited to more technical staff. As the industry got more competitive there was some employee turnover. With limited resources and a lean budget, Penn National Insurance couldn't afford to spend the time or resources training non-technical employees in FrontPage.

"We got off to a good start, but our intranet ground to a halt under its own weight. With budgets cuts and turnover, we lacked the resources to continue with this model," says Christopher Markley, Penn National Insurance's vice president of corporate communications. "The site was a mess."

Penn National Insurance needed to provide an easier way for non-technical staff to add and edit content on their corporate intranet.

Solution
Kevin Kauffman, senior systems analyst for Penn National Insurance, initially found out about Ektron while researching content management solutions on the Web. During that same timeframe, an article about Ektron caught his attention.

"We evaluated numerous vendor packages ranging from free to $100,000. We narrowed our choices down to Ektron and a third-party custom solution. Dollar for dollar, Ektron provided the most bang for our buck," says Kauffman.

Result
"Integration was quick and easy, and Ektron's technology helped us bring our project in on time and under budget," says Kauffman. "Our IT department was initially skeptical because of the low price. They thought 'you get what you pay for.' However, we evaluated several different solutions with a huge range of prices, and Ektron's CMS offered everything we needed and more."

Since the users are all familiar with Microsoft Word, training was a breeze and they have a much easier time editing and authoring content. Now, each department has one or more content administrators who are responsible for all of the content within their section of the intranet. Content is up-to-date, and as a result the intranet is a more valuable tool for the employees. Plus, Penn National Insurance has taken advantage of the style sheet support within Ektron's CMS, so they're now able to maintain a standard look and feel across every aspect of their intranet.

"Our employees are more comfortable with this solution—after just one month the usage improved dramatically. It has empowered people to post content more conveniently than ever before—with less burden on everyone's time. Ektron's CMS has given us an easy, efficient way to author, publish, and manage content so our intranet will be strategically valuable," says Markley.

Kauffman concludes, "Ektron's CMS has proven itself to be an outstanding solution for us."