Inflexible customer solutions and business unit silos are the bane of any organization’s existence. So how does a large, multi-billion dollar insurance organization, with numerous lines of business, create a customer-centric business model while implementing configurable, agile systems for faster business transactions?

The solution is not so simple, but with our assistance, we’ve managed to point our large insurance client in the right direction. What began as a plan to develop a 360-degree customer profile and connect the disparate information silos between business units ultimately became the first step towards a more customer-centric organization.

A major multi-year initiative to modernize the organization’s mainframe systems onto the Microsoft technology platform will now provide significant cost savings over current systems and enable years of future business innovation.

The Challenge

Aside from operating on an outdated mainframe system (hard to imagine right?), our client faced the following issues:

• Delays in customer service functions
• Customer service staff had limited or zero access to cross-unit business applications
• Limited information sharing due to business unit silos
• Limited view of the complete customer profile
• High costs associated with maintaining the system

The Solution

Our first order of business was to replace the older, error-prone core customer management system with a system built on the Microsoft technology platform. This platform supported the requirements of the demanding core customer management system at a lower price point, and was in line with the market’s skill sets to support the mission-critical system for many years to come – a BIG WIN!

One of our main goals was to minimize the impact to other IT systems during the replacement, particularly since this was a multi-layered solution that required integration with many applications. All agile-development for the multi-department effort was conducted in a private cloud environment with Team Foundation Server 2008/2012 and Visual Studio 2008/2012.

Replacing the old mainframe system was the start of shifting the business to a more customer-centric organization. Future projects will continue to extend this plan, and none of this would have been possible on the mainframe platform of yesterday. Our client was able to see the major business and technological advances as a result of the replacement.

• An updated and more thorough customer profile available across lines of business
• A new system capable of providing a better customer experience
• Significant cost savings
• A technology platform that will enable future business innovation for the organization

Future technological advances include:

• System integration
• Low latency
• Routing logic
• Responsive design