Providing independent business systems advice to financial services
WK Webster
www.wkwebster.com
Background
WK Webster 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 & settling, recoveries,
general average & 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 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.
IT systems strategy. User functional definitions.
Scale
6 operating location, 250+ staff world-wide, £9m+ turnover.
Scope of requirements
Case/claim registration, central address book, settlement accounting, management information and statistics, general ledger, office systems, remote office communication.
Islands of information - existing systems were departmental based with little or no sharing of information between operating sections.
Limited processing of input data - undertaken once entered into the various bespoke application systems.
Bespoke applications - 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 site had different versions of the application software which was causing support problems.
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.
An IT strategy was determined 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 bespoke systems.
Microguide Corporate Computer Consultants, 82 Shortlands Road, Kingston-upon-Thames, KT2 6HE
Tel: 020 8549 7152
Fax: 020 8549 8112
Email:enquiry@microguide.co.uk
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