Financial Services: CSC's Exceed Helps Users Achieve Greater Operational Efficiencies

Exceed is the Property & Casualty (P&C) or General Insurance industry's most comprehensive software system designed to improve operational efficiencies and enhance customer's experience with the insurance company. An innovative, function-rich, flexibly integrated set of components can be implemented as a total integrated solution or as a single component at a time.

CSC has the Exceed Personal Lines team responsible for handling all the Exceed related customer requests/enquiries/problems called cases. CSC teams in India and the US adopted a phase wise approach to solve these cases to improve the work productivity.

Business Challenge

Large insurance companies have huge amount of data and processing this data in real-time environment leads to high operating costs to the company. The primary challenge was to improve the Exceed performance by reducing the CPU time required for each transaction (termed as million instructions per second (MIPS)). This factor directly relates to the data centre costs borne by the insurance companies. CSC assured the clients to reduce MIPS of their most frequently used transactions by 70%.

With Exceed going live at the customer end, few cases (defects) were uncovered in the production environment. Another challenge was to fix these cases as well as reduce the huge base case count shown up during the testing phase.

Solution

Facing the need for a replacement of their insurance product with a browser enabled product, the customers used CSC’s Exceed system. In August 2002, Exceed Personal Lines teams from CSC in India and the US were formed to support the existing customers and to cater to various customer demands. Till date, 20 customers have gone live on various subsystems of Exceed like Policy, Billing, and Claims.

In the current Exceed release, the team had to complete all the open cases while continuing to support the customers. At the beginning, there were approximately 1,000 open cases, with customer cases flowing in consistently. During the execution of the project, more cases were received than projected. Therefore, the team had to cope up with the projected open cases by closing additional cases received from different customers. Since customer cases were the highest priority, the main focus for the team was to close them at the earliest, and simultaneously pay attention to the existing base open cases.

From day one, the India team started setting targets for every week and moved step by step. Normally, customer cases take longer time to fix than the base cases. The team linked similar customer and base cases so that the testing time is reduced. Whenever required, the team also extended the overlap time between the US and India teams to reduce the query resolution time. This has helped the team in achieving the set targets.

In July 2006, the Exceed Personal Lines India team achieved the productivity of more than the set targets for three consecutive weeks. The contribution of business analysts (BAs) in helping technicians create policies and scenarios for base cases is immense. This has greatly helped in reducing the turnaround time of cases. Timely help from other teams has been highly appreciated. For example, the Innovation Community (IC) team helped in fixing some cases for billing subsystem.

Results

The effort was a success. The team started with around 1,000 open cases on April 14, 2006 and has already brought the figure down to 571, by first week of September 2006. This has helped the clients experience improved performance of Exceed at low cost.

The third week of July was especially remarkable as it marked a milestone achievement; it witnessed the delivery of 50 cases. The team had set a target of 40 cases per week for themselves. The team set out for this difficult journey and made significant progress on the very first day with the delivery of 11 cases. Everyone was putting in that extra efforts and exceeded the set target by delivering 50 cases in a week. Dawn Cochran, director - Exceed Personal Lines says, “This is an excellent progress on turning around cases. The team should continue to push to reduce our open cases in the coming weeks.”

This milestone manifests how CSC helps companies transform their businesses, improve efficiencies and realize significant returns on investment in Exceed.