Brief description of the company

Zurich operates in Argentina since 1963, offering life and property insurance, as well as other financial services such as funds.

The challenge

As a result of the strong growth in their insurance services, for both individuals and Small & Medium-sized enterprises, Zurich Argentina needed a radical and prompt improvement of its operational processes in order to efficiently manage the increasing demand.
At the same time, Zurich was launching its new financial services line, which required deploying new systems and integrating them with the company’s other already installed systems.
In addition, the technological platform that supported Zurich Argentina’s insurances business had serious deficiencies, mainly consisting in data duplication and heterogeneous technologies. These were a consequence of Zurich’s expansion process through the acquisition of other companies that had their own information technology infrastructure, based on different technologies not integrated to Zurich’s.
All this happened in a context of technological transformation that Zurich was undergoing at a regional level and was leaded by Zurich’s team in Chile, a situation that restricted Argentina’s team from defining solutions.
Due to this critical operative situation in Argentina, it was not possible to wait for the implementation of the regional solution to improve the processes. Therefore, it was necessary to implement a short and medium-term solution aligned with the regional one.

Solution

Hexacta was responsible for analyzing the processes in order to identify which ones required urgent redesigning. This analysis and the subsequent redesign were performed by Hexacta in cooperation with another consulting firm and a team of Zurich’s expert functional analysts.
Hexacta also analyzed the impact of the new processes on its corresponding technology, and defined a technological architecture for the transition phase that supported these processes in the short and medium term, until the new regional architecture was implemented.
At the same time, Hexacta defined the functional specifications for the changes needed on Zurich’s legacy systems for them to be aligned with the redesigned processes.
Currently, Hexacta still provides support to Zurich by supervising the development of the system’s modifications and the roll out of the new processes.

Applied Technologies

This was a technological consultancy project rather than a software development one, meaning that no specific technologies were used or defined.
The architectural design was defined for the manufacturing and marketing management areas, considering as well further platforms for new business lines.
A detailed plan was created outlining deployment details of the designed architecture.