Software Revamp Consulting and PoC Delivery for up to 75x Faster Insurance Workflows

About Our Client

The Client is a European managing general agent (MGA) focused on commercial and residential property insurance, including general and professional liability insurance lines for engineering & construction, travel & hospitality, and retail. For 70+ years in business, the company has established solid brokerage and underwriting capacities worldwide.

Legacy Insurance System Required Urgent Performance Fixes

The Client relied on its custom insurance software to automate sales, risk assessment, quoting, policy administration, and reporting tasks. As the Client’s business scaled up, the software started experiencing performance issues, which resulted in frequent operational delays and poor employee experience. At a certain point, the system failed to handle the growing volume of data and workflows and required an urgent revamp.

The Client lacked in-house development competencies, so it decided to outsource software troubleshooting and modernization to a third-party vendor. Trusting ScienceSoft’s 12 years of experience in creating custom insurance software, the Client turned to our team for system audit, consulting on improvements, and practical assistance in software revamping.

Insurance Software Evolution Consulting and PoC Delivery

Insurance software audit and consulting on improvements

ScienceSoft’s insurance IT experts audited the architecture, tech stack, and code of the legacy insurance software to identify the root cause of its performance issues. The team also interviewed business users (brokers, underwriters, analysts) to understand their role-specific challenges associated with the software.

After analyzing the gathered data, our experts introduced a detailed report describing the reasons for poor system performance, recommendations on how to fix them, and suggestions on the new features that would increase software value. The report listed two alternative turnkey strategies for incremental reengineering vs. complete replacement of the legacy system. Each strategy included a project plan with milestones, team composition, cost, and timelines.

Proof of concept delivery to prove the value of system revamp

The Client found the incremental reengineering of its legacy insurance system a more feasible option. However, the company wanted to guarantee a high ROI from the cost-intensive architectural, code, and database changes. To alleviate the Client’s concerns, ScienceSoft suggested starting with a proof of concept (PoC) for the chosen approach. Conceptualizing and testing some of new software capabilities would help the Client quickly check the revamp benefits and confirm the value of our guidelines.

ScienceSoft provided a team of a business analyst, a project manager, a PHP developer, and a database engineer to handle PoC delivery. The team suggested building the PoC around the potential improvements in automated insurance reporting, which was one of the areas where the Client’s legacy software significantly underperformed. During the PoC development project, ScienceSoft’s experts did the following:

• Our business analyst picked several representative insurance reports for the test scope, prioritizing the reports that often faced delays and errors. She suggested using report generation speed as the primary KPI for measuring PoC success.
• Our PM mapped the PoC project plan with deliverables, tasks, milestones, and time-framed costs. He relied on Kanban methodology to speed up planning under tight deadlines and get frequent updates on the task progress.
• Our PHP developer rolled out a dedicated testing environment and set up the toolkit to measure the performance of the revamped report generation components.
• ScienceSoft’s PHP developer and database engineer collaborated closely on adjusting insurance data aggregation flows at the code and database levels to partially transfer the load from the software back end to the database. Our PHP talent refactored the code behind the report field auto-population features, and the database engineer optimized the database structure and reworked SQL queries to speed up data retrieval. Down the road, our experts identified a range of data pieces and report fields that required manual tuning and instantly communicated the needed fixes to the Client.
• The team analyzed report generation speed after each change increment and reconciled the results against the performance of legacy insurance software.

Following the PoC project, ScienceSoft provided the Client with a comprehensive performance test report. The report showcased 2.5–75x faster insurance report generation after the introduced fixes. The Client was impressed with the results and asked our engineers to deploy code and database improvements in production right away.

A Tailored Software Revamp Strategy and a Successful PoC to Ensure Minimized Project Risks

As of July 2024, ScienceSoft is working on implementing changes to the codebase and database of the Client’s legacy insurance software, running the deployment activities on weekends to prevent business disruptions. ScienceSoft’s consultancy helped the Client clearly assess the software issues and accurately plan corrective measures. Thanks to our advice on the pragmatic remediation scenarios, the company got the opportunity to reduce project costs and speed up the fixes. With the PoC delivered by our team, the Client is now confident about the potential gains from system revamp, as the PoC proved that the proposed steps enable 2.5–75x faster insurance reporting.

Methodologies

Q&A sessions, business requirements analysis, document analysis, system analysis.

Techs and Tools

PHP, WordPress, MySQL, Confluence.