Centric

Centric revived a project to deliver new quoting technologies to serve independent agencies.

The Business Need

A property and casualty insurer launched a program in 2001 to deliver web-based policy inquiry and rate quoting services.  After two years, the program had made little progress toward the objectives set forth by executive management.

Enter Centric

The insurer partnered with Centric on a “rescue mission” to focus on performance improvement and technology best practices.  Since 2004, Centric has delivered on numerous initiatives that strengthened the insurer’s marketplace position and financial results.

A Comprehensive, Value-Centered Approach

The program became a foundation for value creation at the insurer.  Specifically:

• The delivery process and technical architecture developed by Centric was applied across the enterprise
• The internet services developed by Centric were applied throughout the enterprise, including agency management systems and comparative rating technologies
• A refined methodology for managing the program increased the frequency of deliverables while reducing business risk
• New PMM & SDLC standards enable incremental/iterative development, analysis/functional design best practices, structured testing methodology, and automated test execution
• A services oriented architecture is now the standard for any agent facing web application. This architecture, and our rich internet client development framework, is critical to the reuse of the internet services across the enterprise resulting in higher quality application delivery to the market – at a pace faster than what is otherwise possible
• The underlying production infrastructure is composed of JBOSS application server running on Linux.  Our internet services integrate with various database technologies on various platforms (IMS, VSAM, Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, etc.) while SOA integration occurs through XML based web services running over HTTP.

Results

The majority of all new business can now be quoted and submitted through the internet.  The CEO and Board of Directors recognize the success and significance of contributions from the project team.