In an industry as conservative and risk-averse as insurance, the willingness to undertake such a dramatic change was remarkable and unheard of in the local market. But the move paid off, and the results have been astonishing. In less than a year, PPS introduced nine new products into the marketplace, and they took their competitors by surprise in the process.
Not only has PPS been able to introduce new products at an unprecedented rate, but the modular nature of the infrastructure makes modifying those products very simple. “Our competition responded to one of our new product introductions with an offering of their own,” says Stephan Clark, Head of Business Applications, “but within a matter of only a few weeks we were able to modify our offering in reply. Our newfound agility has allowed us to catch our competitors completely off guard.”
The reinventing of business operations at PPS resulted in a number of benefits beyond the immediate goal of improving the company’s speed to market. An important advantage of adopting the IBM Insurance Application Architecture (IAA) is that it provides a comprehensive, validated structure for the entire business, which helps PPS comply with regulatory audits. As is the case in most of the world, the insurance industry in South Africa is very tightly regulated, and companies are routinely checked for compliance. By embracing IAA principles, PPS reduced its audit findings—items requiring remedial action—by 80%. The new applications are also producing improved business results, with significant improvements in controls for collecting premiums.
According to David Gnodde, Chief Operating Officer, it took considerable courage to let go of the past and use technology to innovate. “Doing what we’ve done—fully embracing a proven architecture and deploying a service-oriented architecture based on it—is in a sense straightforward, but in the context of this industry and this market, a fundamental change like we’ve made, amounts to a whole new way of doing business. Our competitors are so focused on the perceived value of their existing processes, systems and offerings that they’re unwilling to break free of them or even see that those legacy assets are in fact hampering them.”
PPS changed the game by focusing on the core of the business and thinking about how to make those core functions work better. As Gnodde said, “Our end-to-end implementation of IAA gave us that solid core, and we’ve been able to build on it and leap far ahead of the competition.”