Fortron Insurance - Service Orientated Architecture

Fortron Insurance - Services Orientated Architecture

Driving profit and efficiency through services orientated architecture

About the Client

Fortron Insurance Group offers insurance products to the Motor and related industries delivered through a national sales channel of over 300 dealers and agents.

Client Requirements

Fortron engaged with CSG to deliver a solution that would Web enable their sales channel, align their business with their IT systems, automate and streamline their back office systems, transform their paper-based records to electronic and provide a reliable platform delivering business agility so that they could innovate more effectively and respond better to changing market forces.

Our Solution

CSG embarked on an SOA transformation for Fortron, which involved transforming not only its IT systems but also its business processes. The existing business processes were centred around manual paper-based processes, supported by three legacy systems that were not workflow enabled and were poorly aligned with the business. This prevented Fortron from evolving and optimising its business processes to best meet the needs of each business unit.

The solution also involved the delivery of a Web-based sales portal called FASTR. This system enabled Fortron’s car dealership network to get instant quotations and to create insurance proposals online. This electronic self-serve approach meant that dealers no longer needed to fill out lengthy insurance proposal forms, and Fortron no longer needed to manually key these proposals into the system.

The FASTR system also provided an automatic risk assessment engine, meaning that dealers knew immediately on the spot whether their proposals would be approved.

Once the insurance proposals were approved, back office systems then automatically handle writing the policy, registering the insured party in the CRM, raising the invoice for the purchase of the policy and the allocation of the commissions to the dealer and agent for the sale of the policy.

This straight through processing approach meant that the volume of policies that could be written by Fortron was increased by an order of magnitude, without having to increase the number of people on staff.

The system automatically detects any outlying situation and sidelines the item to be reviewed by a staff member. A fully integrated human workflow system assigns work items to groups of workers. An available worker then takes the next available task of the work queue and completes the task. When the task is completed, the system then resumes its original process before the outlier was detected.

Business Benefits

Increased business agility – the time taken to introduce a new product was in some cases reduced from months to days;

Automation of business processes – decreased the time taken to receive and process an insurance proposal from up to a month to minutes. This considerably reduced Fortron’s exposure to risk, whilst also reducing the cost of human labour and eliminating the associated errors. This in combination with a human workflow system also allowed Fortron to specialise its workforce so that risk assessment could be assigned to highly skilled risk assessors, while day-to-day customer support tasks could be assigned to customer service operators;

Increased the quality of business written – The automated risk assessment process meant that far fewer high risk policies were approved;

Better reuse of IT investments – SOA has enabled Fortron to implement business logic in support of core business processes once, and then reuse that logic as new product lines are introduced;

Better performance and reliability – The services comprising Fortron’s architecture are designed in such a way that any one service failing does not impact the operation of any other service; and

Integration into legacy systems further reduced the amount of manual effort needed, further streamlining their business processes.