Ariadne – a new chapter for Modell Aachen and orgavision!
Discover Ariadne
WAS stands for Economy, Work, and Social Affairs. As a public-law organization, WAS Lucerne is the central point of contact in the Canton of Lucerne (Switzerland) for questions regarding social security and the labor market. WAS Lucerne brings three core areas under one roof: the Compensation Fund (AK), Disability Insurance (IV), and employment services and unemployment insurance. While these services are distributed across various institutions in Germany—such as pension insurance, employment agencies, and social welfare offices—clients in Lucerne receive many essential services from a single source.
WAS Lucerne supports private individuals, companies, and partner organizations in various life and work situations. Through expert advice and targeted services, the organization helps ensure that people receive the right support quickly.
Before the introduction of Q.wiki, which we call WASwiki internally, processes in the individual business areas were documented using various tools—including Jira, SharePoint, and the intranet. Technical documents were maintained decentrally in their respective areas, while the central management of the system was handled by the quality managers of the individual business units at the time.
This initial situation brought several challenges. One of the biggest was dealing with outdated knowledge. Updating processes and documentation was often time-consuming and complex, which meant that the latest version was not always available in the system. Furthermore, many documents were very extensive and could only be integrated into the existing structure to a limited extent.
Searching for information also proved difficult. Search results often led to content from our internal wiki on SharePoint, while the actual process descriptions were stored elsewhere and therefore did not appear in the search results.
Another challenge was unclear responsibilities and a strong dependency on individual people. Certain processes could only be edited by employees with the appropriate licenses. This led to long processing times and created significant knowledge and operational risks, as critical know-how was sometimes concentrated in the hands of a few individuals.
The merger of our various business units provided an opportunity to fundamentally review our existing workflows and systems. It quickly became clear that our individual tools were no longer sufficient to meet the demands of cross-departmental collaboration and modern knowledge management. Furthermore, our previous solution no longer adequately met the requirements for an ISO 9001 quality management system.
Led by the central quality management team at WAS Luzern, we began searching for a unified platform that could cover the needs of all business units and centrally consolidate our processes, knowledge, and documentation. After a careful evaluation, we chose Q.wiki.
With WASwiki, onboarding new employees has become significantly more efficient. The added value of a central, comprehensive, and up-to-date process documentation is particularly impressive: WASwiki has established itself as the central platform for processes, workflows, responsibilities, and work instructions. New employees find their way around faster, can acquire knowledge independently, and become productive more quickly. At the same time, experienced employees also benefit from this central knowledge base in their daily work. Whether it is process flows, work instructions, or responsibilities: the information needed is quickly searchable and available at all times.
At WAS Luzern, we foster a culture of knowledge sharing and continuous improvement. All employees are encouraged to critically examine processes and actively develop them further. Suggestions for improvement can be easily submitted via a defined change process.
This approach not only strengthens the quality of our processes but also our cross-departmental understanding. Employees gain better insight into the connections and dependencies across our process landscape. This breaks down silo thinking and rigid boundaries of responsibility, while promoting collaboration, transparency, and personal accountability.
This creates a living knowledge platform that is continuously developed and benefits from the experiences and ideas of all employees.
At WAS Luzern, managers play a key role in knowledge and process management. Through organization-wide quality management training, we strengthen awareness of this responsibility and promote the active use of WASwiki as a central platform for knowledge and processes. Depending on the business unit, managers, specialist staff, and process owners are responsible for documenting, maintaining, and continuously developing their processes. They enter process descriptions into WASwiki and are responsible for their content approval. In addition, the WAS Luzern quality management team provides professional and methodological support to these leaders, ensuring through formal approval that documentation meets uniform quality standards.
WASwiki has established itself as the central platform for securing and sharing knowledge. Especially during staff changes or retirements, the platform helps to preserve valuable know-how in the long term and make it accessible to the organization. At the same time, transparency regarding processes, job descriptions, responsibilities, and interfaces has significantly improved. Information is no longer restricted to individual teams or departments but can be used organization-wide. This allows for better utilization of synergies; for example, existing knowledge is found and reused more quickly instead of recreating content multiple times.
ISO 9001 certification creates additional accountability. It supports systematic and traceable process documentation and ensures that processes and work instructions in WASwiki are regularly reviewed, kept up to date, and continuously improved.
We see great potential in further expanding WASwiki as an organization-wide knowledge platform. Our goal is to establish uniform standards for quality management, process understanding, and collaboration across all departments.
Additionally, we intend to link roles and responsibilities in WASwiki with master and authorization data from Active Directory. This would allow process owners and other involved employees to be automatically and specifically notified about changes, approvals, or updates.
The cloud solution and its associated new functionalities also offer additional opportunities to simplify collaboration, further digitize processes, and sustainably develop knowledge management within WAS Luzern.
"Quality is the one thing that’s non-negotiable."
“Q.wiki was the ideal starting point for rolling out knowledge and process management across the organization.”
“It’s not certificates that make processes successful — it’s our employees. And 86% of them use Q.wiki every month.”
We are happy to provide you with inspiring content, current events and news.
