Case Study: Standard Letters
Background:
In August 2002, a business study revealed that Windsor Lifes core administration service,
ALPHA, could produce only 39% of necessary correspondence to its policyholders automatically
each month. The remaining 61%, approximately 27,000 letters, were unsupported by ALPHA
and being manually generated by servicing teams.
It was recognised that there were significant efficiencies to be gained by the development
of a standardised, automated letters system. This would not only provide operational
gains, but would maintain consistency and reduce erroneous correspondence.
Windsor Life chose our sister company Design & Development Solutions Limited (DDSL)
to develop a Standard Letters Generation System that would:
- Produce accurate and consistent communication with its policyholders, thus reducing the amount of secondary checking required.
- Reduce the amount of time devoted to bespoke letter production and subsequently reduce overheads.
- Interface with the ALPHA system to automate the retrieval of policy and client information into letter templates
- Retain flexibility to enable staff to insert bespoke text to meet specific policyholder requests.
- Store the final outgoing letters produced and provide easy accessibility to archived information for Call Centre staff and other servicing teams.
- Be robust and capable of being used concurrently by 400 users.
- Ensure ease of maintenance and scalability in line with future initiatives and legislation.
"A strategically important policy administration project delivered on time, to
budget and with an extraordinarily high level of user satisfaction right from the
initial release."
Gordon Allen
Operations Director
Windsor Life
Solution:
Resources common to both genus and DDSL recommended that the Standard Letters Generation
System be incorporated into ALPHA. Our experts worked closely with operational and
IT staff from Windsor Life to design, develop and implement a solution that met the
business requirements specified. The project spanned an eight month period and was
successfully implemented in July 2003 to timescales set by Windsor Life and at agreed
costs and within the agreed budget.
Technologies:
The solution developed was on an ORACLE database running under HP UNIX.
The graphical user interface was developed in Visual Basic with some C and PL/SQL.
genus...making sense