Centric

The Business Need

A national specialty insurance carrier providing coverage for motorcycle, watercraft, RVs, mobile homes, etc. was struggling to provide a consistent, easy to access interface to a myriad of legacy agent systems. As the Insurer’s business expanded over its 40 year history to include various types of coverage so did the underlying technologies used to deliver it. The Company’s IT infrastructure was diverse and complex including mainframe and server platforms running various applications and middleware including IBM’s MQSeries, Application Server, WebSphere Process Server / Portal / Business Integrator, Apache HTTP Servers, AIX Operating Systems, ZOS for IBM Mainframe as well as DB2 and Oracle Databases. Agents and customer service representatives (CSRs) had difficulty finding the correct application to use to carry out essential tasks such as quoting, claims processing and payment processing for their various lines of business.

To provide Agents and CSRs the ability to better serve their end customers management decided to fund a multi-year effort to build a portal that would provide a consistent interface for many of its disparate legacy applications as well as a standardized modern technology platform for building future application functionality.

Enter Centric

The Client engaged Centric to:

• Refine and improve critical pieces of portal infrastructure and architecture,
• Design and build web services for existing functionality allowing easy access by the portal and third parties,
• Design and build new applications that support and enhance portal functionality, and
• Expose legacy system functionality via the portal.

A Vision For The Long Term

Centric was initially hired to build a single portal web service used to quote watercraft coverage. Given the success of this first initiative, Centric has been awarded numerous other portal related projects. During the course of these projects Centric has expanded and improved the Client’s SDLC methodologies to include Agile techniques as well as incorporated modern software libraries and frameworks. Using a team of Centric software architects, senior developers and a project manager the team has built a:

• Single sign on service that integrates with the portal,
• Rules engine based Agency Management System web service that performs sales agent authorization to determined what business an agent is legally allowed to write based on industry, State, and Federal laws,
• Personalization engine that provides for an agent-branded view of the portal, and
• Policy Administration quoting portlet that handles all aspects of generating a quote for an agent including taking customer information, generating a quote, submission for binding / underwriting, as well as taking payment and submitting claims.

Centric has also been tasked with improving the performance of older portal applications by re-architecting them to take advantage of more standard Model-View-Controller design patterns.

Technologies used to implement these initiatives include many of IBM’s WebSphere offerings such as Portal, Process Server (BPM tool), Application Server, and Message Queue Family.

Business Benefit Realized

Our Client has achieved many of the benefits associated with deploying an Agent portal:

• A clean interface that allows users to intuitively and consistently find the applications they need (the UI utilizes tabs to sort applications by business lines such as motorcycle, watercraft, RVs, mobile homes, etc.),
• Agents and CSRs have increased their efficiency and appreciate that applications are accessible from a single location with a single sign on and provide a more seamless integration with their own agency systems, and
• The portal has provided a consistent technical platform for future development efforts.