| Specialist service provider to marine insurance sector | |
| Business | The Group provide specialist services to clients involved in
marine and other insurance activities world-wide. The Group operates from
its head office in South-East England with offices in London, Europe,
North America and the Far East. The business is built around four core
services; claims adjusting and settling, recoveries,
general average and casualty management and hull
casualties. In addition to this core business, surveying
companies have been set up handling cargo, hull and
machinery damage and condition inspections.
The head office has a 120+ user local area network running the Novell network operating system and supporting predominately bespoke applications written in-house, Sun Account, Microsoft Office applications and internal and external e-mail. All other offices have networks on a much smaller scale running their own versions of the head office based systems. |
| Size | £9m turnover, 250+ staff world-wide, 6 main operating locations. |
| Functions | Case/claim registration system, central address book, accounting (settlement) system, management information & statistics, general ledger, user report writing facilities, office systems (including word processing, spreadsheet, internal and external e-mail, internet access), remote access from various offices and associates. |
| Project | To define an IT systems strategy. |
| Issues | Islands of information
- Existing systems were
departmental based with little or no sharing of
information between operating sections.
Lack of integration - There was little or no integration between the various applications, with common data having to be manually rekeyed into all applications where required. Limited processing of input data - Very little processing of data was undertaken once entered into the various bespoke application systems. Bespoke applications - The applications were mainly bespoke and confirmation was required into whether any of the requirements could be met using packaged software. Limited management information - Much manual effort was required to produce management and statistical reports. Application maintenance - Each location should operate in a similar way but each location had different versions of the application software which was causing support headaches. Appropriateness of systems development tool - Confirmation was required into whether Visual FoxPro was appropriate for future bespoke application development. Old legacy systems - Many of the existing applications were old and had a limited life. In addition the applications looked dated in comparison to the modern windows based applications which were being introduced. |
| Outcome | An IT strategy was outlined including defining a target systems structure incorporating e-business. The vision included a fully integrated system based on bespoke applications for the specialist case/claim registration systems. Following the IT strategy, assistance was provided in preparing appropriate user specifications for the various new systems. |
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