Smallwood, Reynolds, Stewart, Stewart

Eliminating the need for a massive amount of print production and saving Cingular over $1 million in printing costs, our tools went beyond the original goal of providing access to the SPDs and are now used to solve critical employee communication challenges across the entire organization.

Situation   Cingular was spending millions printing Summary Plan Descriptions (SPDs) for employees, as it is a legal requirement to provide every employee with this information. They determined that each SPD kit would consist of 900 pages and cost between $50-$100 each to produce including design and production. In addition to the printed forms, Cingular had created an electronic version of the SPD for posting on their Intranet. However, poor site navigation and organization of the Intranet caused serious problems for employees simply trying to locate the document.

Solution   Upon auditing and assessing the situation, Merge collaborated with Cingular to recommend and implement changes that dramatically improved employee access to SPD information. Cingular was able to identify 14,000 employees with direct office access to the intranet. Merge created a secure Extranet so that field employees could have the same access to the SPDs. By improving user access to online SPDs, Cingular was able to realize tremendous savings by eliminating the need for their printed version. This site was entirely a front-end solution, though Merge’s development-side proprietary content management system managed 7,000 pages of benefits information.

Results   Thanks to Merge’s work, Cingular solved two unique problems with a single solution. These tools eliminated the need for a massive amount of print production, saving Cingular over $1 million in printing costs. The tools have also gone beyond the original goal of providing access to the SPDs and are now used to solve critical employee communication challenges across the entire organization.