NTUC case study. On June 1, 2003, Income succeeded in the migration of its legacy insurance systems to a digital web-based system

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Modernization of NTUC Income

CASE STUDY

NTUC Income (Income), one of Singapore's largest insurers, has over 1.8 million policy holders with total assets of S$21.3 billion. The insurer employs about 3,400 insurance advisors and 1,200 office staff, with the majority located across an eight-branch network. On June 1, 2003, Income succeeded in the migration of its legacy insurance systems to a digital web-based system. The Herculean task required not only the upgrading of hardware and applications, it also required Income to streamline its decade-old business processes and IT practices.

Up until a few years ago, Income's insurance processes were very tedious and paper-based. The entire insurance process started with customers meeting an agent, filling in forms and submitting documents. The agent would then submit the forms at branches, from where they were sent by couriers to the Office Services department. The collection schedule could introduce delays of two to three days. Office Services would log documents, sort them, and then send them to departments for underwriting. Proposals were allocated to underwriting staff, mostly randomly. Accepted proposals were sent for printing at the Computer Services department and then redistributed. For storage, all original documents were packed and sent to warehouses where, over two to three days, a total of seven staff would log and store the documents. In all, paper policies comprising 45 million documents were stored in over 16,000 cartons at three warehouses. Whenever a document needed to be retrieved, it would take about two days to locate and ship it by courier. Refiling would again take about two days.

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In 2002, despite periodic investments to upgrade the HP 3000 mainframe that hosted the core insurance applications as well as the accounting and management information* systems, it still frequently broke down. According to James Kang, CIO at Income, "The system breakdowns were a real nightmare. Work would stop and the staff had to choose either data reconciliation, or backup. However, the HP 3000 backup system allowed restoration only up to the previous day's backup data. If the daily backup was not completed at the end of the day, the affected day's data would be lost, and costly and tedious reconciliation ...

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