Zurich online claims management system drives customer service improvement

Big, multi-national companies with big, multi-national information systems typically have long, slow application development and implementation cycles. But in an increasingly competitive business marketplace, no one can afford to move at anything less than Internet time.

That's why insurance giant Zurich Financial Services made a commitment to revamp its development strategy and break free of the two-year rollout cycles that characterized its IT projects in the past. Instead, the company's management determined to take a bold, new approach to application development rolling out functionality in smaller increments that would deliver immediate benefits, while allowing additional features to be built up over time.

This was particularly crucial for the company's planned Web-based customer-facing systems. "You just can't expect customers to wait two years before they see any results from a development effort," declares IT project manager Lenora Holmsten. "To stay ahead of the competition, you have to deliver something to them now."

Zurich also took great pains to make sure that it was giving priority to the functionality that customers wanted the most. That intensive assessment revealed that, above all, Zurich's customers wanted to be able to manage their claims information online. And so it was determined that the company's first customer-facing Web application would provide browser-based access to Zurich's DB2 claims database, which was housed on an IBM mainframe at the main global corporate data center in Zurich, Switzerland.

It was also determined that Business Objects WebIntelligence would be used to architect the online claims management system, since the companys Zurich America subsidiary had already had success using the industry-leading database access toolkit for a U.S.-only risk management site. And, because Dunn Solutions Group had successfully proven its value in the development of that site, they were again hired for this much larger project.

"Dunn had already demonstrated that they had tremendous expertise with Business Objects technology in particular and Web development in general," observes Holmsten. "And now, they had the added advantage of all the insight they had gained about our systems and our business from the domestic risk management application. So it was a natural decision to bring them on board for this project."

It was already February, and Holmsten was facing a deadline of May 10th for her first demo of the new online claims system. "We have an annual symposium in Switzerland for customers throughout Europe, and it was important for us to show them what we were doing," Holmsten recalls.

As if the deadline wasn't tight enough, Holmsten also discovered that customers wanted to be able to append their own information to the claims data in Zurich's database. For example, an auto parts manufacturer wanted to be able to associate a specific part with every claim. That way, the manufacturer's own risk management specialists would be able to track which parts were responsible for the most claims and respond accordingly.

There were just two problems with meeting this requirement. First, Zurich's database couldn't accommodate every individual customers particular data preferences. "One customer might want to track claims by plant location, and another might want to track them by product," explains Holmsten. "That's not something we were prepared to do on such short notice in our global database though we may do so in the future."

Second, there was no way that Zurich's database administrators were going to let customers monkey around with their carefully architected DBS system. "It was very clear from their initial response that we would have to come up with a solution that left the database as it was," Holmsten says.

And that's exactly what Dunn Solutions Group consultants helped Zurich do. Using the WebIntelligence software, they created a mechanism by which Active Server Pages (ASPs) could be linked to Zurich's DB2 records. This allowed Zurich's in-house programmers to create ASPs where customers could enter the specialized fields they wanted, and then seamlessly retrieve that data along with their DB2-resident data over the Web. By maintaining this customer-specified data in a SQL Server database running on a Windows NT machine, Dunn and Zurich were able to meet customer needs without infringing on the sanctity of the DB2 system. According to Holmsten, "The solution that Dunn helped us come up with was absolutely brilliant. It was practical, affordable, and allowed us to make our deadline with the functionality our customers wanted the most."

In keeping with Zurich's new application development philosophy, Holmsten and her team will continue to add to and refine the new online claims management system. But, when the first iteration was unveiled at the symposium in Switzerland, it was a smash success. Holmsten was particularly gratified to be able to see first-hand how Zurich's customers responded. "I can tell you there's nothing quite like seeing the expression on a customer's face when they watch a demo and you can see them thinking, 'Wow, that's exactly what I was hoping for!'" she beams. "It's a very exciting and encouraging experience, and Dunn Solutions Group was absolutely instrumental in making it happen."