Max New York Life Insurance Company, India

Ibexi has provided a broad range of services to Max New York Life (MNYL) in a number of projects. Some of the areas in which Ibexi consultants have lent their expertise are:

Project: Evaluation and implementation of life insurance back-office solutions

Max New York Life - the Indian subsidiary of New York Life - looked at its emerging business requirements: a new range of products, a new set of distribution channels, new processes and full automation of its operational processes. To keep pace with these, they decided they needed to strengthen their back-office solutions.

Evaluation: Choosing the appropriate path

A team from Ibexi solutions led the evaluation. They started the project with a pre-built set of standard requirements. These structured, detailed requirements for different insurance business processes - with hundreds of items - and a well-defined measurement methodology provided impetus to the evaluation project.

User interviews were conducted to fine-tune these for the specific requirements of the project. Using their extensive industry and technical experience, our consultants factored in the impact of growth and of possible changes in business models - e.g. new sales channels, changes in workflows for policy processing. These helped in future-proofing the evaluation.

Our consultants already had the experience of having worked on many of the common industry solutions. This helped in the comprehensive, structured and speedy evaluation.

Implementation of INGENIUM and ancillary systems

The client chose INGENIUM from EDS/Solcorp for policy administration. It was critical for New York Life to implement the solution in time with no gaps in the high-volume rapidly growing Indian subsidiary

Our consultants created a model office on base INGENIUM within a month. This included the products, and end-to-end workflow: proposal entry, underwriting, policy issuance, policy servicing and claims. This helped users to identify all the business rules, and to review the planned customization.

In data migration, our consultants worked closely with the application vendor as well as the company doing the data migration. They explained the mapping of data across systems, and provided ways to reconcile the data. They also provided functional inputs to enable quick resolution of problems such as mismatches in premium and paid-to-dates.

Business analysis and OLAP

Max New York Life (MNYL), the Indian subsidiary of New York Life, chose INGENIUM from EDS/Solcorp for policy administration, and a Workflow system for
	front office operations and other systems. There was a need for corporate reporting, cutting across all the systems and provide daily analysis to managers at the head office and at the branches. Our consultants built a staging database and a business layer for the analytical data marts. Using Crystal, MS-OLAP and Oracle, these provide the end-users with the ability to slice and dice a data set of about
half a million policies in a matter of seconds. Users have the ability to check the turnaround times for activities, to identify bottleneck areas in policy processing, and to drill-down to specifics using an intuitive drag and drop environment.

Integrated Acceptance Testing

As the implementation of INGENIUM - and several ancillary systems - neared completion, the need for an integrated acceptance testing was acutely felt. The ancillary systems included collection management, agency management compensation & incentives, workflow, interfaces for near real time updates to agency through SMS, Palm, Reporting & OLAP system and financial accounting system. All these systems needed to be integrated and then tested for integrity and for data migration. In addition, there were significant customization and process flows done for Max New York, which also needed to be validated.

The approach was to simulate life insurance operations of a company for a period of 5 years, charting process and product maturity, especially on policy owner servicing and agency compensation.

This required defining a test suite and execution steps over this simulated period with a mosaic of policies and processes. The task also included all the ancillary systems, which had their own processes viz. agency hierarchy changes for agency management system. These were combined in the form of a transaction matrix, which not only identified transactions across various systems on a time line and their associated expected results, but also enabled execution - roles and responsibilities of each test member, as well as recording the observations.

Post-live support

Ibexi continues to provide key support to Max New York Life in India. For the more intricate issues, Ibexi team is on stand-by. Apart from this, Ibexi teams are involved in configuring the systems for new products, and for gap analysis for new releases. An Ibexi team reviews all functional aspects of systems work.

Project : Customisation of Amarta

MNYL used the Amarta system framework for developing their IT applications. The development was being carried out by Infosys. Ibexi consultants were involved in managing the complete business specifications and project management on behalf of MNYL. The activities Ibexi has been responsible for in this project include:

Release management:
          - Prioritisation of requirements

Requirement management:
          - Drawing up scope of the prioritised requirements
          - Specifications of the user requirements, including related reports and documents

Delivery management:
          - Defining the Acceptance Test Criteria for the specifications.
          - Management of user testing of delivered releases.
          - Acceptance for new releases. Training of users for new releases.

Implementation and Productionization

Project: Agency Training

Ibexi consultants have implemented an Agency training solution. This has implemented on a national basis and is used extensively for training agents. This project included

- Consolidation and finalization of requirements with users
- Project management
- Vendor evaluation and selection recommendation
- Gap study, finalization of changes
- Pilot implementation, including system integration testing, user    testing and pilot run for one branch
- Deployment for national usage on the MNYL network.