Life Insurance Company: Enterprise Architecture Solution

Summary

In preparation for a system conversion, DEA partnered with the client to re-engineer its major business processes to reduce process cycle times and processing costs. The process information became the foundation for the client’s business enterprise architecture.

Client Company Profile

A mid-market life insurance company with Individual and Worksite lines of business. Both lines of business offer a variety of annuity, life and disability insurance products.

Business Challenge

The company was converting its administration information system to a comprehensive network computing solution for life insurance, health insurance, and annuity administration. The new technology was intended to replace the mainframe legacy system with a more flexible and cost effective client server platform for multiple product lines and operating companies. To take full advantage of the new technology platform, the company realized they needed to build a business process architecture and model how processing would be supported by the systems.

Solution

The project objectives were to re-engineer the major processes to align with the conversion and establish time of service and staffing models. The major functional areas included Brokerage Administration, New Business, Underwriting, Claims and Policy Administration.

DEA worked with the client to document the key processes and process components throughout the enterprise. Each process illustration provided the business events which started the process, the roles involved, the steps performed and the end result(s) of the process. System Architect, a repository based modeling tool, was used to manage and store the process information which made all the information available and re-usable. Process descriptions, volumes, frequencies, opportunity descriptions, potential solutions, and role descriptions were all captured in System Architect.

Customizations made by DEA to the tool allowed the team to include system interfaces which support the process, delays that occur in the process, and opportunities for improvement in the process. These customizations proved to be extremely useful in preparing and evaluating the enterprise for the technology conversion. The documentation ensured the new capabilities would support the process requirements and assisted in identifying gaps that had to be resolved.

Once each process was completely documented, the results were posted in DEA’s EA/Link™. Using EA/Link™, anyone in the company could view the process architectures and see how they were supported by the systems and technology.