LocalTapiola Group

 The LocalTapiola Group is Finland’s largest non-life insurer/carrier. The company, which manages nearly 2,000,000 policies for their 1.5 million customers, is served by 4,000 employees in a central office, 19 regional, independent mutual insurance companies and the mutual Insurance company Turva. LocalTapiola non-life written premiums are approximately 1 billion EUR. The Progress® OpenEdge®–based WinSure insurance management application is one of the IT systems that underpin its property and casualty (P&C) business. WinSure integrates policy and claims management along with billing and payment processing. WinSure is making LocalTapiola more agile in its P&C business because it is a unified solution that makes it possible for business users to define product parameters without the help of developers.

Today, the mission-critical enterprise system supports over 2,000 concurrent users. This number is expected to increase. The total database size is in excess of 2 terabytes, while the largest single database is over 500 gigabytes. WinSure is also adaptable and versatile in the LocalTapiola environment, running on a mix of operating systems that includes HP Unix, AIX and Windows Server.

WinSure also uses OpenEdge’s replication capability, which plays a key role in the disaster recovery process. Replication provides recovery of essential data for applications at an alternate site, ensuring mission-critical systems are available 24/7/365. Database replication is also required to comply with government regulations covering data integrity and archiving. Finally, it allows business users to do as a large-scale reporting on realtime data without stressing the production environment.

The latest implementation of WinSure has given LocalTapiola’s P&C business several distinct advantages:

• At an IT operations level, WinSure’s distributed architecture and underlying Progress OpenEdge platform make it possible to develop and deploy customized functionality more rapidly and cost effectively than was possible with the mainframes and older editions of the WinSure product. Standardization on the newest version of WinSure has streamlined maintenance and simplified usability. System availability and performance have improved as well.

• Strategically, new insurance products – along with  their systemic counterparts – can get developed, tested and introduced more quickly and economically than ever before.

• At the insurance business level, WinSure’s combination of policy underwriting, billing and payment, and claims management systems is resulting in improved financial results. When claims managers can narrow the loop of informing policy underwriters about risk and loss potential, the overall insurance business improves. Having a single system for policy management, billing and payments reduces transaction administration workflows and helps cut costs.

• From a people and process perspective, the WinSure solution is helping create an agile, innovative business environment. WinSure is designed to enable business users essentially to own and manage the system themselves. One of WinSure’s big appeals is its ability to let business users set process parameters (parameterization) and deploy new functions without the help of IT application developers. “The WinSure application frees developers for other strategic tasks while it reduces IT maintenance and overhead, said Sami Luokkamäki. “It’s all about ‘human capital management,’ one of our major priorities.”

• As a “green” technology, WinSure adds value by reducing paper use. WinSure generates Web-based policy letters and other correspondence that previously had to be printed and mailed.