Business Analysis and Solution
Architecture for a next generation Agency Commission
Management System for a UK-based Insurer
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| Client |
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| Our client is a mid-tier carrier that provides
a broad range of insurance products and services
for its customers in UK and Europe. As a Lloyd’s
insurer, it also underwrites risks throughout
the world. Its products have diverse
requirements and include Motor Vehicle,
Property, Mortgage payment protection, Motor
gap, Business travel, Life assurance and others.
It also provides a variety of Third Party
Administration (TPA) services such as premium
collection, policy issuance, claims handling for
its clients. |
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| Opportunity Summary |
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Client's current system had many customized and
hard-coded operations that made it expensive and
time consuming to add and maintain new schemes for
additional Lines of Business. Nor could the system
evolve to keep up with the changes in the business
needs and processes. Because of this, opportunities
were missed for lack of a flexible solution.
Furthermore, when work-arounds were possible, they
became increasingly convoluted which added
significantly to the system maintenance costs.
To rectify the situation, the client set out to
replace its core legacy system. Several attempts to
customizing an off-the-shelf Policy Administration
system failed because of the unique requirements of
an Agency Commission Management and TPA Service. In
order for the solution to succeed, it not only had
to meet these requirements but also integrate with
the other best-of-breed applications. The new
solution had to provide a way to define products and
operations largely without any coding effort. More
importantly, it must consider larger organization
with interdependent needs and similar technology
requirements to provide a single, scalable,
integrated solution. Prior to engaging Discoverture,
the client had made several attempts over a period
of 2 years to document its business requirements and
come up with a solution with little success. |
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| Discoverture Solution |
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In order to answer the needs of the
client, a four member Discoverture team led
by a Senior Business Analyst conducted an
eight-week analysis to understand the
current business model, analyze the current
and future business needs and recommend a
solution. To complete this task, the team
took the following approach.
Defined System
Needs: The team developed a
business domain model with real-world
entities and concepts that provided a common
context for documenting and communicating
the requirements specifically for Commission
Management and TPA services. They were able
to separate the essential core system from
the definitions of the insurance products
thereby providing a solution that can easily
handle additional Lines of Business.
Recommended a
Well-Architected Solution:
The new solution allows truly configurable
products. It allowed revisions to be created
if and when a Product changes in the future.
It also allowed configuration in covers,
transactions and atomic actions through the
various stages of processing during the
lifecycle of a Policy.
The new solution orchestrated interactions
between many other components (Billing,
Claims, MI, etc.) to govern the complete
solution functionality. To complete each
operation, the Core System was driven by a
Product definition stored outside the
System.
In order to operate successfully, the core
Agency management and Policy Administration
system relied on the collaboration of
multiple independent components. The
interface between the Policy Administration
component and another component is composed
of a number of distinct interactions. This
approach allows the selection of the best
solution for each of the contributing
components. |
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| Benefits |
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The client was able to realize these
key benefits.
- Captured and documented the
right requirements.
- Vastly improved business processes.
- Increased automation which frees up
client's staff to provide better
customer service.
- Defined a flexible architecture
and solution designed to increase
efficiency, competitiveness and
customer satisfaction while reducing
costs.
- Delivered a key phase of the
project that drives rest of the
implementation on schedule and
budget.
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