Collaborating with Canada’s Largest Insurance Mutual to Create a High-Performance Website

Evolving Web collaborated closely with Beneva—a newly created giant in Canada's insurance sector—to launch a new Drupal-based website that is accessible, performant, and built according to Drupal best practices.

Our experts worked as an extension of the client's team of developers, content specialists, and scrum masters, providing technical assistance and guidance throughout the project.

Services: Web Development, Maintenance and Support

Beneva is Canada's largest insurance mutual, with more than 3.5 million members and customers, over 20 billion CAD in assets under management, and employing over 5,000 people.

Beneva results from the merger between two insurance companies, La Capitale and SSQ Insurance, announced in July 2020. The company's head office is located in Quebec City.

Between March and April 2021, Evolving Web assisted SSQ with upgrading their website to Drupal 9 and provided Drupal training for their staff.

Given the success of this collaboration and our experience with large-scale Drupal projects, the client reached out to us for support in the launch of the new Beneva website, scheduled for January 2022.

Our primary goal was to help Beneva launch a stable Drupal-based website on schedule. To achieve this goal, we proposed a staff augmentation to:

• Ensure the new website was built based on Drupal best practices and industry standards
• Verify that all integrations and the codebase were stable and maintainable
• Work closely with the client's teams, proposing solutions and providing feedback to guide the technical aspects of the project
• Plan workflows in collaboration with the client to meet the deadline successfully
• Transfer Drupal knowledge efficiently, empowering Beneva's technical teams to develop, configure, and maintain their website as independently as possible

Here are some of the solutions Evolving Web brought to the Beneva project:

• Website restructuring by adopting Paragraphs as "building blocks", giving content editors more flexibility; our team built a prototype to show the client how efficient Paragraphs are and how they became the standard way of building in Drupal.
• Workflow development in the CI/CD system ("continuous integration, continuous delivery") to automate the delivery process, making it more consistent and reliable, and improving the overall quality of the project
• Smart cache management to serve users with region-specific content without hampering caching, a crucial aspect of website performance
• Daily, automated data synchronization from an external database into Drupal through a special system our team built on top of the Feeds API
• Assistance and guidance provided to Beneva's technical teams, ensuring the highest efficiency and best practices in Drupal development
• Accessibility adjustments, consultancy, and QA alongside a third-party expert working for the client
• Simplified markup for the main menu, using as much Drupal default structure as possible,, to provide the best possible accessibility
• Content integration support for Beneva's team of content specialists

The new website, launched in January 2022, serves helpful, region-specific content and several features to its users with high-speed performance.

These are the main results of our work on the Beneva project:

• Accessibility - Our accessibility work resulted in a perfect 100 on the Google Accessibility Check.
• Paragraphs - A total of 20 Paragraph types (content components) that content editors can use to build visually-rich pages
• Content integration - A complete online user guide for content editors, describing all the content and presentation options available
• Collaboration - We worked as an extension of the client's team, generating a high level of collaboration, synergy, and trust that enriches the project.