Customer case studies
Birla Sun Life
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A little about Birla Sun Life.
Born in March 2001. Birla Sun Life Insurance is a joint
venture between Aditya Birla Group and Canada based
Sun Life Insurance. With a Rs. 530 crore turnover last
year, Birla Sun Life has 40 branches all over India, with
seven more to come in the next year.
The company's growing pains.
The heart of any insurance company is the policy
administration system and the challenge lay in the fact that
the policy administration software ran on different platforms
and supported different databases.
This was purely a need-based decision, as insurance
companies deal with a large amount of data everyday. BSLI
spent a good amount of time in short listing its main
application software, called Life Insurance Administration
System. What it needed now was the right hardware and
database software on which it could run this system.
The IBM solution.
Birla Sun Life chose IBM as its partner to provide IT
infrastructure.
"Looking at volume, looking at ruggedness we wanted, the
response time, and the costs, etc. we chose the UNIX system,
RS/6000 from IBM," reveals MC Raisinghani, VP, Technology.
DB2 became the choice for backend database because BSLI
felt that with DB2 in place, it could easily move to higher
platforms if volume increased, without getting into
conversions and upgrades.
BSLI is also using IBM's CICS, the transaction gateway
software and WebSphere in this integrated system. Setup
and implementation was done by IBM's software team.
Omnitech, an IBM partner, did the coordination. This was
followed by four weeks of exhaustive testing in a
simulated environment. IBM's Lotus Notes is in use for
both messaging and automating office administration
workflow applications over time.
The result - Life is easy.
All the branches are automated and connected to the
main branch from the first day of operation. Receipt is
very important in the insurance business, and due to this
automation, the customer gets the receipt instantly from
the branch.
The integrated automated system with data centre and
proper disaster recovery mechanisms have ensured not a
single day’s downtime in three years.
Customers can see the status of their policies over the
Internet, as can insurance advisors, who can easily
access their client’s policy details.
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