Client
The client is a leading insurance business offering a range of general insurance products. They have a 170-year history and are one of the UK’s largest personal line insurers, with over 6.5 million customers and 4,000 employees.
Challenge
The client was looking for a trusted technology partner with deep expertise for a long-term SLA-driven managed services engagement for their IT application ecosystem. The scope of this challenging exercise encompassed:
- L2 & L3 application support and maintenance of 150+ critical business applications for the life protection, savings & retirements, and shared service business units
- Managed testing services covering end-to-end (E2E) testing and quality services and automation and manual testing
- Development and transformation services, including the transition of legacy systems onto the guidewire platform
- Power BI DataMart development and support
- Infrastructure support for cloud-native digital applications
Solution
Hexaware’s managed services solution leveraged automation at all levels of application management with a highly optimized application support and maintenance delivery model. The fundamental building blocks of the solution that helped maximize business value included:
- Comprehensive service coverage, defined by 9*5+ on-call application support and 24*7 call center support with efficient onshore-offshore collaboration.
- Cloud-native infrastructure for digital applications built on microservices and API-enabled architecture for the customer and IFA.
- A modern delivery approach leveraged for agile teams to deliver quick and rich benefits with Scrum for development and Kanban for maintenance.
- A Center of Excellence (CoE) to drive innovation and agile culture transformation.
- Continuous improvement through SOP enhancements, shift left activities, and monitoring of the vendor ecosystem.
- Deployment of our automation IP module, Tensai® for Efficiency, to reduce application support tickets.
- Our integrated framework for end-to-end test automation across the testing lifecycle.
- Automation of 60% of test cases using Selenium test manager and integrated with JIRA.
- A dashboard for monitoring performance and CI opportunities, integrated with ITSM, JIRA, Selenium, and other automation tools.
- DevOps along with ISTIO service mesh for automated CI/CD for applications on the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster.
Benefits
The 7+ years of SLA-driven managed services engagement resulted in manifold benefits and tangible savings.
- 30% reduction in Total Cost of Operations (TCO)
- >6 customer satisfaction scores consistently
- 35% reduction in infra spend on compute
- 40% improvement in application release velocity using DevOps
- 20% increase in incidents Service Level Agreement (SLA) adherence
- 25% increase in System Reports Claim (SR) SLA Adherence
- 60% reduction in ticket volume
- 30+ applications monitoring implemented as Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI)
- 80% reduction in ticket backlog, improving CX
- 10 times more application coverage
- 50% reduction in testing efforts via automation
- 40% improvement in test design productivity
- 100% updated test documentation
- 80% agile coverage and rapid innovation
- 40% reduction in call volumes
- Automated requirement traceability information
- Faster time to market and improved customer experience
Summary
The client’s long-term collaboration with Hexaware on a managed services model fueled a 30% reduction in their TCO. The proactive application support and maintenance of more than 150 critical business applications helped drive efficiency and improve customer experience. The 40% increase in velocity of releases and reduced deployment failure by streamlining processes and breaking silos with DevOps helped drive faster time-to-market. Setting up a Center of Excellence was vital to driving a culture of innovation across the organization.
The rewarding journey for the client was a catalyst to their goal of growing customer value and their vision to be Britain’s best-loved insurance provider.