PepsiCo wanted a solution to their summary plan description (SPD) dilemma. The company had recently made the leap to an online format, publishing their SPDs in Adobe Acrobat (.pdf format) on their benefits Internet site. But the PDFs had several limitations: time-consuming maintenance, slow downloads, limited navigation and lack of search capabilities.
To address these shortcomings, PartnerComm introduced ContentXpert™, a document management system in which content is generated in Microsoft Word format and then converted to XML. PepsiCo’s benefits staff was able to create, upload and publish the summary plan descriptions on their own — without the need for programmers or outside vendors.
Through the use of menus, dynamically generated topic lists and “breadcrumb” navigation (which displays a user’s path through the site and provides links to previously viewed pages), we redesigned the site so that employees would be no more than two mouse clicks away from the HR information they needed. The search engine feature further enhanced the accessibility of the online SPDs.
After implementing ContentXpert, PepsiCo reduced the development and production time by as much as 88%, producing and publishing SPDs for the 2002 plan year within just three weeks. In the past, it had taken from three to six months.
