WebSphere Process Server Insures Insurer's Success
Description
- Migration to WebSphere Process Server
Business Needs
- Integrate disparate systems
- Technology "refresh"
- Improve flexibility, scalability and openness
Software
CLIENT BACKGROUND
One of the reinsurance giants in the industry and one of the largest reinsurers of life and health insurance, this client operates through three business groups: property/casualty, life and health, and financial services. It reinsures life, health, property, casualty, and liability insurance. In addition, the company conducts and publishes scientific investigations relevant to the reinsurance and insurance industry.
BUSINESS PROBLEM
With the Life and Health Division driving a majority of this reinsurance company’s revenues, it was critical the group have a technical infrastructure capable of supporting future growth. They therefore launched a strategic, large-scale initiative to address some key business requirements:
- The organization looked to better integrate the several disparate systems serving the business in order to improve the overall quality of data and suite of applications for the Life and Health Division. The applications supported primary business functions including claims processing, underwriting, technical accounting, policy administration, and quote treaties.
- Another strategic goal was to do a “technology refresh.” This refresh would modernize and update their overall infrastructure allowing them to move off of unsupported or outdated technology. Accomplishing this goal would reduce the company’s operational risk – a critical concern – and avoid steep maintenance fees and surcharges. The immediate priority was to address the insurance company’s business process management (BPM) environment, improving its flexibility, scalability and openness. The environment was based on Sonic BPM, a technology that had announced its end-of-support in 2006 and was being supported only through special arrangements.
SOLUTION
The company’s first step was to select a new BPM platform that would best orchestrate the assets of their business and automate the insurance company’s mission critical applications, supporting over 500 business users in multiple locations, ranging from Claims Management to Underwriting to Technical Accounting. After a thorough evaluation process that included a Proof-of-Concept by Prolifics, they decided to standardize on IBM WebSphere Process Server (WPS), a high-performance business engine capable of running the critical business processes securely, consistently and with transactional integrity. The IBM technology provided a single vendor solution that would integrate well with their other IBM technology products and offer a simpler operational model.
Prolifics, selected as the company’s technology partner for its deep SOA expertise, provided architecture and development assistance to build out the new infrastructure in just 9 months, redefining the business processes with WebSphere Process Server by rechoreographing and adjusting workflows. The new architecture, developed using a standardized methodology based on Rational Unified Process, offers better troubleshooting, exception handling and recovery processes. A more flexible and maintainable solution, the company can now make technical changes without needing to redeploy the entire business process. Prolifics was also able to replace the Sonic layer without affecting the back-end services – key to a smooth rollout.
The new streamlined and simplified design will improve, both in speed and efficiency, the company’s overall developer productivity, and should improve performance on systems such as Policy Administration which processes 500,000 policies per day. The SOA implementation will also allow them to reuse business processes across different parts of the organization and claims lifecycle, and in the future they look to further harmonize common business processes.
The initial results have been very positive, meeting the key business requirements, and the organization looks toward future enhancements to include opening up to a B2B model supporting 300 of the largest insurance companies and enabling globalization with Unicode and international character set support.