Legacy Software Modernization for Efficient Policy Issuance

Synergistic engineering effort builds up customer loyalty for a US insurance major

Client and Goals

A US niche specialty property and casualty insurance company operating globally. The client approached us to tackle increasing labor cost and workflow inefficiencies through automation.

Behind the curtains, the client’s workflows would get actuated by the legacy software, which was only getting costlier and harder to maintain. In terms of policy issuance, the original system imposed limitations on agents and underwriters. The policy issuance cycle used to involve a processing center who would approve/decline the policy issuance. The entire cycle would take too long to complete, thus downgrading client experience.

With the renewed system in place, the client was hoping to cut costs through efficiency, improve software performance and flexibility, and build customer loyalty with the faster policy issuance cycle in place.

Solution

The functionality automates the forms filling and policy issuance for agents, underwriters and a processing center. It enables agents and underwriters to issue policies when bound, rather than sending them to the processing team to issue.

The AIS team is a dedicated team working according to the specifications prepared by the client’s BA. The client provides all the required infrastructure. Our team connects to the remote workstations on the client’s side via RDP.

Work done

An automated process is in place for issuing policies.
The forms are automatically filled in and attached based on quote data.
The system collects financial, benchmarking, and tracking metrics, which allows building insightful performance reports.
The automation logic created for this software will be reused to automate more processes within the organization.

Challenge

Although our team qualified for the development project, prior to setting off with coding, AIS engineers had to plunge into the deep domain waters. Next on the to-do list was to blend in and synchronize the development workflows with the client’s team. After the onboarding phase was successfully completed, the joint team went on with the real fun.

In order to make the legacy software flexible and easy-to-maintain, it was decided to decouple the old monolith system into microservices. Despite its many benefits, the microservices approach is way harder to implement than a monolith, and imposes higher qualification requirements for engineers. Moreover, the team had to deal with the complex qualification logic, which was scattered across multiple applications. The whole endeavor was a risky yet necessary high-wire act for a 6,000-talent company, but the joint team revived the system, with business logic suffering no damage.

Tech Stack

.NET
VB.NET
SQL
IIS

WebForms
MS SQL Server
Windows

AIS Team

6Software Developers

3Quality Assurance Engineers

Client Location: USA

Project duration: 1.5 years (ongoing)

Results

Over the months of efficient collaboration, the joint team comprising the client’s and AIS talents has dramatically improved the company's workflows.

Automation has brought a great speed-up in policy issuance procedures
The team has established a solid basis to automate other company’s products
Customer experience is yet to be assessed in the long-run, but the system remodeling is expected to have a huge positive impact, judging by the recent feedback from the customers.

The AIS team has become a natural extension of the client’s team. We meticulously follow the client's requirements in terms of processes and milestones, even outperforming the client's team at times. We speak up and suggest our own solutions when the client needs a second opinion. Our QA team shows top commitment throughout the entire project despite changing requirements and significant workload.

As a result, the client has reduced their dependency on the manual labor of the processing center and stabilized the system, which now is ready to grow with new vigor, without old errors and bugs in its way. The client expects fines for late/out-of-balance compliance forms to drop, as the policy issuance procedure takes fewer steps and less time to complete. Transparency through detailed reporting and better customer service add up to the impressive list of improvements achieved through the legacy software modernization.