IT Consulting For Insurance

"Kumaran's dual competency in Insurance Domain and Technology ensures client's IT investment spent on best breed of technology & solutions to achieve business efficiency and quick ROI"

Insurance IT Strategy and Implementation

In today's highly competitive business environment, productivity is the key to success. Insurance companies must produce more, with fewer resources, at a lower price, and in a shorter period of time than ever before. Information technology investments are often made based on high projected returns, but few companies have the time or expertise to critically review investment proposals or calculate the actual return. In many cases, IT investments made with the expectations of increased productivity actually end up reducing productivity and wasting IT dollars

What's required are new approaches to deliver higher levels of strategic value to the organization at lower cost. The goal is to fully use your technology efforts and align IT with your company's enterprise strategy.

Demand More From Your IT

Our IT Strategy and Transformation Solutions are designed to help insurance companies increase the value of IT efforts for the enterprise. We help you identify, articulate and gain executive management consensus and work with you to define the right alignment between IT and your insurance business. Once alignment is reached, we can help identify opportunities to improve IT efficiency and effectiveness and create blueprints to set the strategy and transform IT.

With Kumaran IT Strategy and Transformation Solutions, you can achieve:

• Better alignment of IT and business - By integrating IT strategy with business strategy, you will increase the value that IT offers to the enterprise through greater innovation, risk management and operational integration.
• Greater efficiency - Our portfolio of solutions helps control expenses while improving overall IT value.
• Enhanced IT credibility - Raise the credibility of IT throughout the organization by consistently delivering on-time and on-budget projects, meeting service level agreements and contributing to financial performance.
• Improved Consensus - Building across the Enterprise — By actively involving and engaging executive management, you can gain support from the highest levels of the organization, allowing you to execute on the roadmap.

To explore the benefits of Kumaran IT Strategy services contact Kumaran Systems at insurance@kumaran.com

Insurance Solution Architecture and Design

Kumaran architects are equipped with knowledge of leading enterprise architecture frameworks and tools to realize the framework. As part of the engagement, the team has established formal processes, policies, principles and guidelines to enable the Insurance companies to take decisions on technology directions and technology acquisition

Architecture is the critical part of the software project, Kumaran team provides architectural consulting services to software products and solutions to make sure product/projects are executed as per required functionalities and meets all quality parameters such as performance, security, reliability, availability, portability, modifiability and conceptual integrity. Kumaran team has extensive experience in architecting enterprise wide application with architectural approaches such as

• Model Driven Architecture (MDA)
• Service oriented architecture (SOA)
• Object Oriented architecture (OOA)
• N-tier architecture

Kumaran offers Architecture and Design consulting in the following key segments:

• Enterprise Architecture - equipped with knowledge of leading enterprise architecture frameworks and tools the team has established formal processes, policies, principles and guidelines to enable the enterprise to take decisions on technology directions and technology acquisition
• Application Architecture - design applications to automate business processes and provide functionality that will help users perform business tasks.
• Integration Architecture - design solutions that enable existing applications, packaged software offerings, networks, and systems to work together within an enterprise or among enterprises.
• Information Architecture - focus on the data used by multiple applications, including the structure, integrity, security, and accessibility of that data.
• Operations Architecture - design solutions to manage the infrastructure and applications used by the enterprise. This includes defining plans, strategies, and architectures for the installation, operation, migration, and management of complex information systems.

To explore the benefits of Kumaran Architecture solution contact Kumaran Systems at insurance@kumaran.com

Insurance Application Consolidation and Standardization

Insurance companies have always been at the forefront of adopting new technology initiatives. However, over time, insurers have accumulated huge portfolio of applications. The trend of mergers and acquisitions has further added to the complexity of maintaining applications.

There comes a time when application consolidation is necessary to keep your insurance business agile and growing smoothly. Application consolidation can reduce the complexity and cost of storing the information associated with critical business operations. When you consolidate applications, you'll see:

• Greater end-user productivity and improved business operations resulting from enhanced application performance
• Robust disaster-tolerant application support and faster backups, and more importantly restores, for Exchange, Oracle, and MS SQL
• Increased application availability because you'll be able to quickly identify, isolate and proactively fix issues affecting applications
• Improved ability to comply with increased regulations

In Application Consolidation, the focus is on:

• Identifying applications that are duplicated, can be outsourced or rendered obsolete
• Reducing the number of application instances and databases
• Migrating multiple instances of the applications from disparate platforms
• Standardizing on single application and database solutions
• Tuning the applications performance to meet your unique requirements

Key benefits

• Improved reliability
• Improved availability
• Improved control of IT resources
• Improved service levels
• Improved security
• Improved utilization of computing resources
• Improved standardization
• Reduced server license and operating costs
• Reduced maintenance and integration cost
• Support for legacy software

To explore the benefits of Kumaran Application Consolidation services contact Kumaran Systems at insurance@kumaran.com

SOA for Claims and Policy Administration

SOA has become the hot word today to make computer systems interoperate.

Kumaran understands the SOA technology and spearheading Insurance companies in their SOA initiatives.

SOA makes the diverse computer systems, applications and different hardware a non-issue.

Insurers can SOA enable any of their systems even if it is on legacy technology to make their applications interoperable and agile.

Insurers can use the SOA technology to make their policy systems more agile, exposing the existing systems to the young and technology minded persons. Similarly the claim systems can also be opened up – making them easily integrate with other systems, displaying the real time status of the claims, and improving the claim processing time.

This technology makes EDI redundant by making the relevant systems talk to each other without any proprietary network.

Insurers can easily use this SOA technology to add life to their existing systems and improve their ability to service customers.

At Kumaran, we analyze the current requirements and bottlenecks of an Insurer and approach the SOA transformation incrementally. The valuable legacy IT systems can be converted to services to help them achieve greater business benefits at a low cost.

Legacy systems can be reengineered/SOA enable in well thought out small but significant steps. This will ensure that the systems are transformed to participate to support new business processes and operations.

For instance, claims processing in the insurance industry is a paper-intensive, detail-oriented, regulations-restricted exercise. Claims processing is the most visible aspect of insurance, as it is when the insurance company makes good its promise. So it is important to the image of the insurance company, to maintain an efficient claims processing system.

Claims processing systems have to interact with other systems such as policy administration, customer support, and financial systems. Claims processing involves many actors such as claimants, claim representatives, medical personnel, and legal personnel.

Traditional claims processing spans legacy systems, sequential processes, paperwork, and silo-ed systems. To be agile, an insurance company needs to be able to break up its sequential processes into smaller business functions that are more responsive to changes. To do this, we use a methodical approach that results in a service oriented architecture, that will service enable the existing system. By service enabling the system, the organization can free up its business processes to do the following:

• Get more information in the first report
• Apply business rules to assign claims in real time
• Improved control of IT resources
• Build workflows
• Trigger alerts and notifications
• Make changes faster to existing code
• Build new services and processes by orchestrating existing functions
• Reuse existing code and save costs

The number of interactions between the customer, the insurance company, and the Claims Processing and Policy Administration systems, can be seen in the following figure:

With SOA approach, the number of interaction between multiple users and claims & policy administration systems has cut down with SOA services.

Slicing the workflow into independent services and introducing modularity frees up the system from its current restrictive sequential practices. After separating the workflow into modular services, we need to create interfaces to the services. Knowing a service's interface makes it possible to use it in a variety of combinations with other services

Creating services that receive and return messages in pre-defined formats can increase business flexibility. The service itself can be a black box, with its internal business processes unknown. By creating interfaces that communicate through messages, it is possible to free the service from its sequential bind. If the Claims Processing module is able to send claim information to external entities through messages, the same message can be received by mobile phones, by email, and through the Internet. The key is to standardize the communication format, both receiving and sending.

Service Oriented Architecture, when followed in the Kumaran way gives concrete results that map business processes to information systems. This results in a better business-IT alignment, which is to the advantage of the organization.

To explore the benefits of Kumaran SOA solutions contact Kumaran Systems at insurance@kumaran.com