More than 60 Santam offices in South Africa and Namibia support their network of about 7 500 intermediaries. Highly trained consultants assist brokers and clients with, amongst others, insurance quotes and policy amendments. Santam has assets totaling more than R12 billion, a countrywide infrastructure and broker network and more than 650 000 policyholders throughout South Africa. Santam also has business interests in Zimbabwe, Malawi and Zambia.
The Business Case
Santam's Insurance Brokers Resource Centre (IBRC) searched the market for a package that would meet their needs. The system had to provide underwriting, claims, finance, commissions, report and batch processing functionality, as well as interface into 3rd party applications. IBRC then acquired an off-the-shelf software package in order to use portions of it to build an application suitable for their business. The customisation of the application was under great time constraints, due to the highly pressurised nature of their business.
The system would be used internationally, and so it needed to "get it right first time".
ViaData
The Resource Centre engaged ViaData to provide the solution to meet its business needs after satisfying itself that ViaData was a suitable partner for the project as it possessed the necessary skills and capacity.
Solution
ViaData was initially called in because of its understanding of the Resources Centre's business needs and its suitability to provide the required solution. ViaData also provided development skills and became involved in optimising the application for the web; ViaData also built an application monitoring solution that tracked system performance and an interface into the Resource Centre's Management Information System. Further, a version upgrade distribution system was designed to distribute software upgrades across all clients seamlessly.
All change control procedures were substantially documented, and a large data migration project of more than a year was completed, whereby information was taken off the mainframe and included into the application.
ViaData was also tasked with a data conversion and customisation project for Santam's U.K. subsidiary, Westminster Motor Insurance Agency, a British company focused on taxi and private motor insurance. The project involved integrating Westminster's data with the IBRC's systems, cleaning and transforming the data and ensuring that the two data systems interfaced correctly.
At the end of the project, the Resource Centre had a system that conformed to their business requirements and that could be maintained in-house. ViaData worked in conjunction with the Resource Centre staff to provide a complete training and hand-over service.
