Copyright © 2009 Accenture All Rights Reserved. 1 Copyright © 2008 Accenture All Rights Reserved. Client background This client is one of the world's largest life insurance and pension groups. With headquarters in Europe, the group employs more than 25,000 people worldwide. Its businesses serve millions of customers in markets throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia, with major operations in the United States, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Business Challenge Although it was positioned as one of the leading providers of life and annuity products in the United States, the company was constrained by its complex, legacy-driven technology and inefficient operating environment. This resulted in lost market opportunities and decreased profitability. In turn, a new strategic partnership that saw the company acquire the operations and books of business of two life insurance subsidiaries created additional problems, including: Difficulty in deploying innovative products to the market at speed. Reduced service support for its independent field force, coupled with quality issues and scalability concerns due to manual processes. A higher cost of ownership due to multiple policy administration systems, tightly coupled point-to-point integration and an inability to process e-business cost-effectively. How Accenture Helped Accenture led the post-acquisition analysis and planning to integrate the acquired companies’ IT and business operations. This involved a current state assessment, IT hypothesis development, target state definition, gap analysis, actionable roadmap development and business case analysis. Accenture then directed the operations and technology integration planning effort and defined the future operating model comprised of the people, process and technology capabilities required to achieve the company’s strategic objectives. Accenture also helped outline a new product development process driven by a single policy administration system. Additionally, Accenture helped define the service-oriented architecture (SOA) capabilities needed to shield policy administration consolidation from other enterprise systems and enable scalable, cost-effective business-to-business integration to support key partner and customer service objectives. As part of the planning process, Accenture helped the company identify and prioritize gaps between current and future state operations, and helped develop a practical roadmap to achieve the company’s objectives. High performance delivered By relying on Accenture’s expertise and experience, the company now has a roadmap for the transformation of its technology architecture with transition state objectives and deadlines, including lift-and-drop technology processes and solutions, data systems conversions and move-then-improve systems and process strategies. The target state defined technology capabilities that allowed the company to shield policy administration from other enterprise systems, enabled business-to-business integration that aligned with industry standards while cost effectively supporting proprietary, legacy formats, and facilitating improved customer-centric support by increased integration between enterprise and customer-facing applications. The company also has a three- to five-year implementation plan for consolidating multiple legacy administration systems on a single platform that supports the entire policy life cycle. The company can realize substantial benefits from the single administration platform, including the ability to: support all open and closed blocks of business implement new, innovative products more quickly and at a lower cost using the “product chassis” concept, which enables a faster go-to-market approach for new products by making slight variations to a core product already implemented on the system. achieve improved quality and service levels and provide consistent distribution experience. In addition, the single administration platform can reduce operating costs through customer and agent self-service and straight through processing. Operational efficiency is expected to improve percent and the client can expect a percent reduction in total cost of ownership. About Accenture Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world’s most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high- performance businesses and governments. With approximately 177,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries, the company generated net revenues of US$23.39 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, Its home page is External use approved for some uses. Visit KX for full posting. Posted November 2009.KX Leading Global Life Insurance and Pension Group Business/Technical Architecture Strategy