Our customers provide the best insight into just how productive, reliable and successful Sapiens solutions have been.
AXA: Web-based Personal Motor Insurance
The Challenge
AXA was facing a challenge of speed. They wanted to enable their potential customers to obtain and accept insurance quotes on-line. AXA was looking for a solution to support their own development and introduction of a web-based personal motor insurance product and to integrate it with their existing back-office policy administration system.
The Solution
Sapiens eMerge Technologies and methodologies are the key components for this web-based application. eMerge provides the integration backbone to the system's component elements.
The Result
The new system substantially speeds up the motor insurance process. It enables customers to obtain and accept an insurance quote online. It then registers the policy and automatically issues the corresponding policy documents. Sapiens was able to integrate the web-based motor quotation system with AXA's current mainframe policy administration application, without making any changes to their legacy application. This has subsequently been extended to support other lines of business.
Sapiens was able to "pull together all the different components of our solution to give us a new speedy route to the web for our products."
Dave Sutcliffe
e-Business Technology Manager
AXA Insurance (UK)
Principal Financial
The Challenge
The Principal Financial Group needed to transform their legacy system after having identified several key problems in their business-critical defined benefits systems:
- Mail volume and distribution Issues
- Processing rules not enforced in systems, they existed purely in documentation and with specific employees
- Physical paper handoffs were necessary to complete processes
- High resource growth-rate to support business scalability
- Complex systems & processing rules made training new employees time consuming and expensive, this resulted in:
- Processing delays
- Processing inconsistencies
- Processing errors
The Solution
In order to address these crucial issues, Sapiens and Principal defined a solution with several key goals:
- Simplify Workflow
- Enforce Consistent Administrative Processes
- Improve productivity, accuracy, timing
- Same-day processing
- Reduce costs associated with doing business
- Provide competitive edge in marketplace
Consistent with these goals, Principal added new business functions and developed a task workflow architecture, which included document imaging and coordination of imaging workflow. Sapiens' approach to rapid implementation allowed the team to cut the project delivery schedule from an estimated 3 to 5 year timeline to 18 months – even with imaging workflow, which was not included in Principal's original 3-5 year timeline.
The Result
Express Processing System
- Client/Server system delivered in 20 months
- Installed for 100 users in December 1996
- Rolled out to 2400+ users between December 1996 to June 1997
- Initial volumes - 1.2 million Sapiens transactions daily in 12 CICS regions
- Fast, accurate, paperless administration
- Principal owns, supports and operates applications in-house
Though Principal did not specify that the initial solution should be rule-based, upon completion of the system they realized the value of such an environment. Consequently, Express has become the key platform for Principal Financial Group's core defined benefits processing solution, and has been extended continuously to provide a fully automated solution for all activities within the division. The system has been extended to the web, and today provides browser access to over 2,000 users within Principal and millions of fund participants throughout the United States over the web, through the interactive voice response system or through Principal call centers. No matter what the route into the system, the underlying rules maintain the integrity of the process being executed.
The realized benefits to Principal of the system are:
- Workflow and Work Prioritization
- Transactions eligible for same-day processing are processed the day they are received
- Ensures work is being processed by most cost efficient resources
- Processing Rules Controlled by system
- Enables easier training of new employees
- Provides process consistency across departments and geographic locations
- Reduced training costs of new employees
- Processing rules encapsulated in the system means there is less for new employees to learn.
- Rules that interpret user skills allow people to become productive more quickly. As soon as they are trained on 1 process, they can do that process.
- Reduced rate of staff growth
- Automation/Extension/Integration efforts have allowed us to capitalize on the core system. This has allowed us to eliminate large amounts of manual work that was once required.
- Provides competitive edge in marketplace
"Sapiens provided a realistic and natural way to design the system with quick ways to build usable applications and productive middleware integration. We're handling 1,200,000 transactions every day. Our success and aggressive plans for leveraging the Internet brings additional opportunity and huge benefit to Principal Financial and our clients."
Susie Thomann
VP at Principal Financial Group
Liverpool Victoria Friendly Society:
Life & Pensions Administration System for Closed Books
Liverpool Victoria is the UK's largest Friendly Society, providing a wide range of products and services in Life Assurance, Pensions, General Insurance and Banking. It manages funds of approximately £6.5 billion for its 2 million customers, and consistently tops performance tables for with-profits life and pension policies.
The Challenge
Liverpool Victoria wanted to significantly reduce the operational cost base for administering their life and pensions Closed Books. Their existing systems were expensive to maintain, induced operation inefficiencies and were unable to support their desired levels of customer service.
External pressures - the volatility in investment markets, eroding margins, and further regulatory uncertainty - all added urgency to Liverpool Victoria's need to implement a cost-effective solution.
The key objectives of the Sapiens project were to build a complete replacement for their outdated policy administration systems and to migrate the data for 3.5 million policies onto it. The new system would become Liverpool Victoria's single strategic platform for all their existing Closed Books, and also enable them to easily integrate further books of business that they expected to acquire in the future.
The Solution
The Sapiens solution involved the development of a life and pensions administration application to replace Liverpool Victoria's existing hybrid of ICL and PC-based systems, plus the migration of all existing data from an ICL to an IBM mainframe (Liverpool Victoria's preferred strategic platform).
The system was built using Sapiens eMerge technologies and RAD methodologies. It is fully integrated with Liverpool Victoria's other essential systems, allowing existing IT investments to continue to be utilised. It also has a browser-based user interface, allowing versions of the application to be automatically rolled-out, reducing ongoing PC support costs.
During the entire project, Sapiens consultants worked hand-in-hand with Liverpool Victoria's business management to review existing administrative practices and re-define business processes in order to take full advantage of the new web-enabled environment.
An underlying requirement of the Sapiens Closed Books Solution was that it should facilitate future transition to Euro. Sapiens' considerable experience in the field of Euro Impact Analysis and Euro Migration was applied in the design and development of the application.
The entire project was completed within the targeted timescale of only twenty-four months, and also to budget. This speed of delivery, from initial requirements gathering, through design and development, to final delivery into production, was an outstanding feat.
The Result
Implementation of this solution has significantly reduced the cost of administration of these 3.5 million policies, and has also enabled Liverpool Victoria to streamline its business processes. The new solution offers one-stop process execution, reduced training needs and costs, greater transactional throughput, better management information, improved reliability and improved financial control.
"With the new system from Sapiens, we have achieved a very significant immediate reduction in our IT costs",.. "Also, using their extensive Life and Pensions operational experience, Sapiens was able to review our administrative practices and build a far greater degree of process automation into the new system, which now enables us to provide a much improved customer service."
Michael Allen
Business Project Sponsor
Menora Insurance Group
Implementation of Auto Insurance at Menora Insurance Group
The Challenge
Increasing competition in the Israeli insurance market, and the emergence of major direct insurance companies required that Menora Insurance Group "regroup" in order to remain competitive. Menora had three main objectives in the auto insurance field to increase their competitiveness:
- Expand their customer base
- Retain low risk-customers
- Increase revenues while reducing costs
The Solution
Together, Sapiens and Menora developed an auto insurance program which provided Menora with a significant competitive advantage. The program is based on Sapiens' eMerge solution, which enables a smooth and rapid transition to e-business, while leveraging their existing IT Systems. Menora, in an effort to reduce costs, did not want to develop any new systems every time new technology is released. Menora was interested in preserving their investments in existing systems. Thus, they leveraged their current systems on the Sapiens eMerge solution. Sapiens was chosen as a partner for this project, due to its ability and expertise in the insurance sector and extensive experience in implementing mission-critical solutions for large-scale organizations.
The Result
Menora's solution, which used eMerge Technology, linked 170 agents through the intranet and another 500 agents through the Internet.
The development of this solution was completed, delivered, and implemented within 4 months. To date, Menora is still the only insurance company in Israel to use e-business in its work processes. After several months of operation, Menora still reports better insurance products for their consumers and higher profitability for the company.
"The success of the project enables Menora to be the only insurance company to perform e-business with our agents on the Web. Our success is based on leveraging existing sapiens systems, using fast and reliable development solution - Sapiens eMerge - and providing a fast response to customer needs."
Mr. Yehuda Grossman
Software and Technology Manager
Menora Insurance Group
Occidental Fire & Casualty of NC
The Challenge
Occidental Fire & Casualty Company of NC (OF&C), a specialty insurance company serving the transportation industry for over 40 years, needed to transform it's business processes in response to changing market dynamics. OF&C recognized that their existing policy life cycle information flow could be streamlined by automating interactions with their managing general agents (MGAs) over the Internet. Mission critical manual procedures between MGAs and OF&C were time-consuming and inefficient. OF&C needed current, accurate, and readily accessible information to meet MGA requirements and reduce operating costs. OF&C turned to Sapiens to bring its policy processing environment into the 21st century, which included web enablement, a real-time quick-quote feature and optimized policy workflow. Sapiens, with its deep understanding of the Property and Casualty insurance industry and rich technology heritage, was well suited to assist OF&C with its e-business transformation.
The Solution
OF&C's management and Sapiens' insurance team worked together to review the business requirements to improve communication between OF&C's MGAs and their Raleigh truck transportation marketing and underwriting service unit. Sapiens successfully implemented a solution that gave the OF&C MGAs an intuitive interface to the mission critical data contained on an IBM iSeries platform running in OF&C's back office. Sapiens rule-based technology facilitated rapid solution development and enabled OF&C and their MGAs to easily capture policy information, improve information retrieval and provide improved services to their customers via the Internet.
The solution consists are three core elements:
- Policy Rating Engine - Occidental wanted to web-enable and automate its rating engine to provide their MGAs in the field with fast access and rapid responses to policy rating requests. The Occidental-Sapiens team accomplished this by integrating and upgrading Occidental's CSC Point system with an All Lines Rating (ALR) automated rating engine. This back office system was web-enabled for front-end use by Occidental's MGAs using Sapiens' iWay Interaction Server technology.
- On-line Quick Quote - Occidental needed a "Quick Quote" policy system to enable their MGAs to provide customers with reliable quotes over the phone in five minutes or less, often using limited information. The Quick Quote system allows MGAs to negotiate policy rates on the spot, rather than take information from the customer, seek out manual quotes, and call back the customer. The "Quick Quote" greatly increases sales opportunities through maintaining and capitalizing upon the the personal contact dynamics in the quote process.
- Centralized Printing Forms - To further enhance productivity, Occidental decided to centralize its business forms to allow for distributed printing via the Web. Data from activity files are called from DB2 database tables using eMerge and are then converted into Active Server Pages for viewing and printing via the web.
This comprehensive solution enables OF&C and their MGAs to easily capture policy information, improve information retrieval, and provide improved services to their customers via the internet.
The Result
The highest priority for OF&C was to consistently offer excellent customer service to their MGA community, increase overall productivity and throughput. This was accomplished through quicker processing time and more accurate reporting of data. The web-enabled front end for OF&C's policy processing environment provides efficient policy life cycle functionality and individual account information retrieval to their MGAs, empowering them to increase sales volume and customer satisfaction.
Menora Insurance Group
MediRisk Implementation at Menora Insurance
Menora Insurance Group, established in 1935, is one of the top five insurance companies in Israel. The group provides a wide range of insurance, including Life and Health, with annual premium income exceeding $400 million.
The Challenge
Menora was using a proprietary software-based underwriting system for Life insurance, but felt a need to upgrade to a solution that encompassed more up-to- date medical diagnoses and medications. In addition they wanted a solution that integrated physician check-ups and laboratory evaluations, and also tracked previous applicants medical records, so that the company would be better able to manage their medical underwriting business processes, in order to provide improved customer service and reduce costs.
The Solution
During 2002 Menora looked at various solution options available on the market and, after a pilot deployment, made the decision to implement MediRisk for use in their Life and Health underwriting departments. The solution has been fully integrated within Menora's IT infrastructure.
The Result
Menora has now fully automated the individual Life and Health risk assessment processes, and are in the process of deploying the solution at 'field level' through insurance intermediaries. Customer service has improved significantly, with the new business and underwriting teams being able to react to the incoming business more efficiently. The senior members of the underwriting team have more time for underwriting the sub-standard cases, and they also have more time available to support the newer members in the team effectively.
"We are extremely pleased with the performance of the MediRisk solution, and especially with the flexibility of the system. We see our company rapidly advancing towards a major breakthrough in the Life and Health insurance market.
With the MediRisk solution, we anticipate gaining significant business benefits, by increasing our throughput while significantly reducing our associated New Business costs. These business benefits will be translated into providing Menora with significant advantages over our competition. "
Mr. Yehuda Grossman
Software & Technology Division Manager
Menora Insurance Company
Clal Insurance Company
Implementation of Medical Underwriting System
Clal is the 2nd largest Life & Health insurance Company in Israel. With $1.2B in annual premiums and 24% of the Israeli insurance market, the company serves over one million customers via 1500 independent agents and fully owned insurance agencies.
As a leading player in the market, Clal is constantly looking for ways to improve its competitive advantages and product offerings, while maintaining the highest level of service to its customers.
The Challenge
Due to increasing competition in the Israeli Life & Health insurance market, Clal sought an advanced Medical Underwriting solution that will:
- Help the company improve its service level while driving down associated operational costs
- Ensure underwriting process accuracy while avoiding faulty underwriting decisions that might turn away prospective clients or impact the insurers' competitive edge
The Solution
Equip the Life & Health underwriters, both in Company branch offices and in headquarters, with MediRisk - a powerful medical risk assessment software tool.
The Result
"Clal's underwriters can now call upon a more extensive set of medical parameters to help assess their underwriting decision, and therefore ensure more accurate and consistent underwriting decisions, regardless their level of expertise. At the same time, the Company's underwriting guidelines are now implemented across the branch offices, avoiding costly risk assessment errors."
Mr. Eli Inbar
Deputy General Manager, Life Insurance
Clal Insurance Company
