Private i: Inside Solutions is an opportunity for IBM i and Power Systems vendors to describe a customer success story involving one of their products. System iNEWS receives no payment from the vendor, and the vendor receives no payment from System iNEWS. Answers are edited for continuity and clarity.
The Beacon Insurance Company (beacon.co.tt) felt it needed to devote more attention to its direct corporate clients and increase turnaround for its broker customers to streamline and energize its business. But its existing solutions didn't allow Beacon to measure workflow timelines and manage tasks spread out across different parts of the company. That's when Beacon turned to application development and modernization vendor LANSA (lansa.com). Since implementing three solutions from LANSA, Beacon has picked up the pace of its business, with an eye toward growth.
Tell us about your customer.
The Beacon Insurance Company Ltd. is headquartered in Port of Spain, Trinidad, with 12 branch offices throughout the southern Caribbean. It offers a full range of insurance products and financial services, including general insurance, life and health insurance, asset management, and financing. With annual revenues of $45 million and 125 employees, Beacon's mission is to provide high-value insurance services, inclusive of the expeditious and mutually satisfactory settlement of claims. The company regards the quality and delivery of its services as its main competitive differentiators and is constantly aiming to improve in these areas.
How does the Beacon Insurance Company use i?
Beacon runs LANSA applications on an IBM i model 525 with OS 5.4. When it extends controlled system access to its brokers and policy holders (a LANSA project in progress), this is likely to be implemented on the back-up IBM i that's kept in sync with Mimix (same model and OS). Beacon has two development staff members, and there are 60-plus current users of the LANSA-based system. The number of users will increase to 100 towards the end of 2011. When the Claims and Marine modules go online, the number may increase to 150.
What specific problem inspired Beacon's search for a new solution?
Beacon wanted to provide more personal attention for direct corporate clients and increase turnaround for its broker customers; however, the company's Insure/90 system and internal procedures didn't allow for either. Beacon's Insure/90 implementation served as a robust database underwriting system, but it didn't have the workflow feature to measure timelines or the facilities to effectively manage tasks or documents that span two or three different divisions. For the customer, the static and hierarchical organization of products and divisions meant that they had many different points of contact.
What LANSA solutions does Beacon use?
Beacon uses three LANSA products:
- Workflow Framework, a generic engine, was quickly configured for Beacon’s many desired business flows. As part of the workflow configuration, each process step was defined with a target timeline. Alerts were set to highlight any processes in danger of incurring unacceptable delays, allowing for timely corrective action.
- RAMP was used to modernize Insure/90. It includes prototyping, re-facing, and development facilities, and allows refaced RPG/COBOL programs, newly developed Visual LANSA programs, .NET programs, websites, and other applications, to be integrated in a single portal, with tabs, filters, search results, and business object details.
- LANSA Integrator was used to enable automated PDF generation of policy contracts and other documents and realtime integration with Beacon’s existing document management system via web services.
How have LANSA's solutions helped remedy Beacon's problems?
Beacon has complete visibility and control of how documents progress through its system, ensuring that agreed timelines are met. Supervisors can accurately forecast how many policies will be presented for signing in the next hour and are alerted when tasks are threatening to fall into a time-lapse zone, allowing for immediate action. The workflow solution’s realtime dashboard provides a high-level view for management to drill down to details.
Beacon formed a division entirely focused on customer contact to provide “a one-window view." Having a single point of contact is possible because the workflow and electronic document management systems provide staff with a company-wide view of quotes, policies, and claims, regardless of the division where the information is processed. This allows management to re-assess roles and resources. Previously, resources needed to physically be in a specific office. Now they don't even have to be on the same island.
Many other measurable improvements have been achieved. For example, the task of packaging a policy has been reduced from 15 minutes to just one minute. Beacon assembles over 40,000 policies each year, so the savings will be dramatic.
There are also huge efficiencies from RAMP's improved navigation over Insure/90, as more than 100 users can now gain information quickly and accurately. Information previously hidden three to six screens deep, is now directly available on a tab.
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