Case Study 1- Motor Insurance Compliance Solution
A solution designed to reduce the cost of business to motor insurance underwriters, increase their revenue, create an efficient and automated response to EU Directives and reduce uninsured driving thus increasing road safety.

Business Requirements of the Project - The motor insurance industry was faced with compliance to the 4th and 5th EU motor insurance directives which deals with the issue of identifying a driver and their insurer when driving abroad. All EU member states must put in place a solution that allows for a centralised method of identifying and tracking all insured vehicles and sharing this information with the police for road-side detection.

In the UK, the system implemented was the motor insurance database, which cost £49 million pounds to implement. For the Irish market, the Irish Insurance Federation decided to develop their own solution with the help of TEKenable and in co-operation with the Garda Siochana and the Motor Insurance Bureau of Ireland.

What was required was an efficient, low cost solution to the information requirements the EU motor insurance directive. The solution had to be able to instantly determine if a car is insured and who insures it. This information had to be up to date and available to the Gardai Traffic Corp’s on-board vehicle camera systems.

The Solution: Project Detail - TEKenable developed a centralised system to record and manage all the movement of vehicle registrations between insurers. The system is built on Microsoft SQL Server and C# .NET technology and as well as the back-end processing algorithms provides various secure file transfer interfaces (public facing as well as Government VPN) as well web based portals for supervision/management and authorised enquires, designed and built entirely by TEKenable in Dublin.

 

 

 

 

The system took approximately one year to develop and was completed in 2010. It is operated and managed by TEKenable and is hosted in a dedicated, highly secure hosting facility. for time lag from brokers etc and compiles a list of “uninsured registrations” which is fed directly into the Gardai PULSE system. The new system is secure, simple, and powerful, and gives the Gardai, the Motor Insurance Bureau and other authorised enquirers such as the PIAB the ability to identify a vehicle’s current insurance status and track a registration number’s history of insurance. The insurance industry bodies are very happy with it because the solution is low cost, efficient, easy to understand and deploy. It also requires only a low cost of annual service support.

This solution has proven abilities to reduce the number of uninsured drivers on the road and in doing so reduce the cost of uninsured claims to the motor industry in Ireland, which pays out approximately €60 million in claims annually for uninsured drivers. Quoting from the MIBI in 2006 “This [uninsured driving] serves to increase the cost of motor insurance premiums by an unnecessary €45 each.” All the motor insurers, brokers and industry bodies are now involved in the program.

 

 

 

From left to right: Niall Doyle, Corporate Affairs Manager for the IIF, Peter Rose, Director of TEKenable

 

Case Study 2- WebCentral
Contractor Management Solution for Webcentral Ltd

Business Requirements of the Project - ADI Ireland is a leading operations and maintenance business and is part of the international ADI Group. The company specialises in areas like facilities management, project management, electrical engineering and maintenance contracts. The business has a very significant responsibility to manage the subcontractors it oversees on each site they operate.

There are also a number of legal requirements to be met in order to satisfy health and safety regulations. Each customer site has their own level of security clearance processes which must be adhered to before personnel can come onto a site. ADI needs to be able to assure the owner of the facility that all subcontractors are trained to the required levels in their respective areas and they are compliant with all the relevant regulations. This puts a large administrative overhead onto the company for each site they manage, with the subsequent effect on costs.

As a result, they went out to the market to find an application that would manage the subcontractors at the level of detail they needed. In particular, a system which would allow subcontractor firms to “register once” for multiple sites would be invaluable. This means that once a subcontractor firm became registered as compliant to the relevant standards, they could work on any ADI controlled site without any further paperwork.

Having looked at the products available ADI realised that there was none that did what they required and so following the creation of a separate trading entity, Webcentral Ltd, TEKenable were brought in to build an application to meet their specific requirements.

The Solution: Project Detail - Following a lengthy process of evaluating the exact details of the customer’s requirements, the new application was built over a six month period in a cloud computing environment by the team in TEKenable’s Cloud Computing Centre of Excellence. The new application was built using Microsoft Windows Azure as the cloud development platform. This allowed TEKenable to develop the product without incurring the costs associated with traditional techniques of application development. There was no additional technical burden being placed on Webcentral Ltd to build a development environment, employ additional staff, or incur any additional IT infrastructure costs.

By utilising the cloud computing development model, the costs of the project were able to be kept extremely competitive and the entire project was completed for a fraction of what it would have through a traditional build cycle. The new application is called “CMS One World” and was successfully rolled out by Webcentral Ltd in April 2010. It has successfully met the requirement for ADI, to centrally manage and “pre-validate” all the subcontractors it oversees before using them at the various facilities they operate. This means that once a contractor has successfully been registered on their system as compliant for all the relevant regulations at one customer site; they are now pre-validated to work for ADI and will not need to go through this process again in order to be used on another customer location.

This system allows companies to manage the relationship with suppliers by monitoring required documents and ensuring visitors to sites are properly inducted. It has been warmly welcomed by the subcontractor firms as it dramatically reduces their administrative overhead too. Webcentral Ltd, are currently in the process of selling this product to other Facilities Management companies, globally, as well as large Manufacturers and have begun advanced negotiations with a leading British manufacturer with numerous sites globally. Utilising ADI’s global contacts it is expected that a large volume of enterprise clients will be brought on stream over the next 24 months, making “CMS One World” a truly international system.

 

 

 

From left to right: Mike Morrissey, Sales Director of TEKenable, Conor O'Carroll, Director of Webcentral, John Ghent, Head of Consulting at TEKenable.

 

Case Study 3 - Independent Trustee Company
New Application Brings Dramatic Improvements in Business Process Efficiency

Business Requirements of the Project - Independent Trustee Company (ITC) is an Irish company, established in 1993, based in Dublin and employs 50 staff. ITC delivers a range of pension plans for their clients and are now one of the largest providers of self-administered pension structures in Ireland. ITC administer more than €750 million in client funds through 3,000 pension structures. ITC clients are typically self-employed professionals like company directors and corporate clients such as financial advisors. ITC employs a complex mix of pension specialists that are engaged in the operational process of the company. These people are pension specialists, accountants, tax consultants and solicitors who review and interpret changes in legislation for their client base. This enables ITC to provide comprehensive guidance so that their clients gain full advantage from their pension structures within Revenue guidelines.

Due to the growth of the business, ITC approached TEKenable with a number of operational issues they needed to address; around areas like workflow processes and documentation management. The main issues were:

• Duplication of documentation.
• Excess staff numbers involved in document production and validation.
• No central repository of information and documentation.
• No workflow system to ensure continuity and reliance on individuals.
• Multiple visits to 3rd parties and customers to distribute and collect information.
• No visibility on process flow once a financial product has been initiated.
• Too many high cost, inefficient, manual and paper based processes.
• Client & intermediary need to do more work within the processes.
• No automation of inter bank connectivity or payment process.
• No automation of 3rd party connectivity – Revenue, Brokers etc.

Project Requirement Analysis - After a detailed requirements analysis process, TEKenable and ITC identified the key requirements of the new solution to be as follows: • Centralise disparate repositories of information within ITC and provide a centralised location for streamlined processing of the Client Portfolio Executive’s ((CPE’s) day to day tasks. • Integrate across new and existing IT systems such as; document management, pension calculators and banking transaction feeds. • Provide an on-line interface for ITC’s broker network and customer base. • Provide management with a central location for market intelligence.

The Solution - To enable more efficient processes around account management, the iTRUST system uses embedded 3rd party pension calculation engines for ease of use and modification, as changes can regularly occur; dictated by the market or regulatory compliance requirements. TEKenable liaised with various banking providers to ITC, so that the iTRUST system to consume ITC bank account transaction data on a daily basis. This also allows a much more detailed client account management system, in which ITC can now generate customer account information in a streamlined and automated fashion..

The requirement for a central location of market intelligence was addressed by the development of a suite of market intelligence reporting tools. These are designed to support more informed management decision making and even better regulatory compliance. Finally, the system includes a new Broker interface, which pushes the core functionality of the system to the Broker network; vastly improving the broker and customer experience with ITC.

Business Benefits and Future Development - “ITC now have one core system that contains the data and functionality to support their day to day business in a more efficient and powerful manner than before”, said Nick Connors, Managing Director of TEKenable. “ITC’s Client Portfolio Executives have their relevant client data and tasks centralised, improving their day to day work activities and allowing them to concentrate on value-add work for their clients and previously complex disparate activities are now centralised into defined processes”, he said. “In addition to the operational and cost saving benefits, we now have better market intelligence to support our decision making and iTRUST provides us with the ability to more easily meet any regulatory requirements”, said Niamh McDonald, Operations Director of ITC.

The iTRUST system has allowed ITC to improve operational efficiencies and improve productivity to such an extent that they now require less staff to handle what are greater volumes of business. Although iTRUST has been designed to integrate with the existing technical environment in ITC, it can be seamlessly developed with whatever future technologies ITC invest in. This means it provides an excellent long term reliable platform for expansion to meet their changing business needs.

 

 

 

From left to right: Niamh McDonald, Operations Director of ITC, Noel Walsh, Head of Microsoft Development at TEKenable, Nick Connors, Managing Director of TEKenable