Financial Software Services: Improved ROI through Migration of Client's Legacy Data to Exceed

Exceed, the Property & Casualty (P&C) insurance industry’s most comprehensive software system, helps large insurance companies improve service and reduce cost and time-to-market. Insurers can use Exceed's components independently to extend and enhance the life of their legacy systems or as a fully integrated technological and functional upgrade of their systems across all lines of their business.

The client has licensed CSC’s Exceed replacing its old processing system, which administers more than 350,000 policies across all four lines of its P&C business. The client believes that Exceed will help the company get new products and product changes to market faster, while improving its ability to serve the customers better. The client has gone live with Exceed for its three Lines of Business (LOB).

Business Challenge

The insurance industry is very competitive. To sustain revenues and margins, companies must be operationally efficient, client-service focused and nimble in introducing new products rapidly in the market. As a leading insurance provider, the client wanted to improve its supplier arrangements in the areas of quality, cost and cycle-times.

The client’s core applications ran on legacy platforms. With the existing system, it was cumbersome to support the launch of new products and other business enhancements. After much analysis and research, the insurance company chose CSC’s Exceed software to replace its existing system.

The business challenge was Big Bang conversion of client’s Policy Management System (PMS) data into Exceed. Additionally, Exceed release 2 needed to be delivered within a one year timeframe. By replacing its entire processing system with Exceed, the client will have the capability to transform their business processes and position the company for growth.

Migrating Legacy Application Data to Exceed

The India team started project implementation in collaboration with CSC team in the US in January 2004. There were 69 dedicated core team members, including 36 members from the offshore team, working round-the-clock on this project from four different geographical locations.

This delivery has a special significance for CSC in India as more than 50% of the CSC team was from India. This is one of the few enterprise delivery projects where India is involved in almost all phases of the project lifecycle.

As most of the team members were new to Exceed, replacing the entire legacy processing system with Exceed seemed difficult. Though, it was the first time when this conversion was happening for huge data, CSC's experience in the insurance industry helped deliver a solution that upgraded client’s system across all its LoBs.

To begin with, experienced resources provided knowledge transfer to the new team members on Exceed. In addition, the Exceed base team was closely involved with the new team in merging base cases and fixing base problems.

Results

With the team’s dedication and commitment, 95% of the client policies are on Exceed. The statistics of the Big Bang conversion are indeed highly impressive-

• More than 1,47,000 policies were converted during Big Bang conversion in just 35 hours.


• 650 Auto cases were delivered after being tested on more than 1,500 test cases, including 23,000 test conditions. Whereas Home release was tested using 23,000 test cases including 1,23,000 test conditions, resulting in error-free delivery of 1,500 cases.

This milestone manifests the power of Exceed and how CSC helps companies reduce risk, transform their businesses, improve efficiencies and realise significant returns on investment in Exceed.

CSC’s India team has played a crucial role in achieving the milestone. Commenting on this achievement, the client Vice-President and COO says, “We are smiling with you today and proud of you. You have done again what many in our industry said could not be done. You did it with client and R-2 Auto before and here you are doing it again and doing it “way better” than before. Individually, we know your very dedicated and talented people just looking out for our customers. We thank you for that. Collectively, you have demonstrated you are truly a force to be taken seriously. Yeah, you are AWESOME! Thanks so much for your fine effort and example of what can be done in taking a dream to reality.”

This delivery is uncommon and will set the standard for which CSC will be able to create value for the client moving forward.