Case Study: Achmea slashes portal time-to-market to 3 weeks and cuts costs with Avanade's Microsoft SharePoint Portal Factory

Avanade helps Achmea develop faster, cheaper and more efficient portals with Microsoft SharePoint

Achmea, the Netherlands’ largest insurance group with 8 million customers and brands such as Centraal Beheer, Zilveren Kruis and Interpolis, faced costly duplication and long lead times building many brand-specific portals. Although most sites required the same features (news feeds, social integration, process automation), design and development were decentralized and repeated for each brand, driving up costs and time-to-market.

Avanade partnered with Achmea to build a SharePoint-based “Portal Factory” of reusable components, delivered by onshore and near‑shore (Bratislava) teams using Scrum to centralize build and maintenance. As a result, straightforward sites now go live in about three weeks instead of six months, portal-build efficiency improved 19% in 2013, costs were cut, SEO performance improved and Achmea gained greater scalability and maintainability.

Achmea

Eppo van der Plas

Component Factory Manager