Taking the initiative to provide the client with a better overall solution, integrating third party software with their SAP system

Background

A leading insurance broker chose to expand its operations to include underwriting policies themselves, to take advantage of the accumulating knowledge it had about its customer base. They decided to start with motor insurance.

Having selected the software supplier to deliver a policy creation and management solution, they needed someone to help them integrate this into their core SAP system. This was not as straightforward as it might seem owing to the nature of the product. Payment terms are flexible, subject to change, even cancellation during the duration of the policy.

The Solution

Having benefitted from the expertise Pivot brought to a previous integration project, the client didn’t hesitate to engage them again on this one.

The Pivot consultants quickly set about the task and developed 4 interfaces using PI with webservices and nightly batch files;

• an inbound policy interface to capture policy data in SAP. This data is then converted into ‘Sales orders’ on which ‘Revenue recognition’ is run. Recurring payments are initiated for monthly plans and policy amendments and cancellations are processed with corresponding transactions, initiated by the interface logic
• an inbound ‘Payment request’ interface to allow payments to be processed in SAP
• an outbound ’Payment status’ interface to feed this information back to the calling system
• an inbound ‘GL movements’ interface to mirror the ‘Claims system’ ledger structure.

In fact the Pivot consultants finished their work well ahead of budget and ahead of the ‘Policy creation’ software.

In the absence of test files from the third party software supplier, to test the new interfaces, the lead Pivot consultant took the initiative. First he developed a tool to test the interfaces using data from Excel spreadsheets. He then developed an error handling transaction to facilitate easy editing of invalid data for revalidation and reprocessing.

By the time the third party software was ready, not only were the interfaces ready and proven, the client had an error handling system which exceeded the performance of what they had originally planned for. And the Pivot consultant had still delivered well within the time originally budgeted for, which gave the client the option to deploy him on other much needed system improvements.