Case Study

Amentra Helps Fortune 500 Insurance Provider Centralize Payments Processing

Service:
Systems Development
Industry:
Insurance
Engagement:
Full Lifecycle & Mentoring
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Significantly reduced duplicate maintenance and inconsistent payment processing

Before Amentra

A successful auto insurance provider had developed multiple applications, under several departments, which separately processed customer payments. The applications were developed and maintained by different groups using a variety of technologies. Minor changes to the company's business requirements for accepting payments from the customer resulted in massive maintenance efforts which required an extensive amount of coordination. It was extremely difficult to keep the various applications consistent with one another. Also, some users had to use mainframe legacy systems to take payments, because many applications were designed without payment features to save development time.

After Amentra

  • A reduction in the duplicate maintenance and inconsistencies in payments processing between the various systems resulted in an annual savings in support costs.
  • Business analysts were given enhanced control over the business requirements and this allowed for easier reporting capabilities.
  • A centralized, web-service enabled payments application, which allowed for greater design flexibility and reuse in other applications.
  • The common payments component improved the efficiency of payment transaction processing across all systems.

Evolution of the business process

Prior to the Amentra solution, the Fortune 500 auto insurance provider had business logic for processing payments in applications from both the Sales and Service departments for both auto and motorcycle insurance. Each application was maintained by a different group and was developed in different technologies such as Java, Smalltalk, and COBOL. Amentra was tasked with designing a common payments component that could be centrally maintained and easily re-used by each of the applications. The new component had to be flexible to allow for evolving rules to accepting payments and adding different types of payment. Amentra also coordinated efforts with a backend system team which provided the third-party merchant integration.

Applied technologies and expertise

Amentra leveraged the insurance provider's previously designed service-oriented framework as a foundation for the project. Amentra's robust middleware design simplified the development of complex payments transaction processing. Amentra was responsible for the original design and development of the insurance provider's service-oriented architecture, which was effectively reused across the board in this effort. Consolidating payments rules on the application server provided a central location for the various clients to access the same processing code. Amentra defined a common payments API that was web-service enabled.

For the client portion of the payments processing, Amentra developed a generic Java Swing application that could be easily plugged into the various clients that were based on a pre-existing UI framework. Client requests to the middleware were made using the SOAP protocol. This client component was then integrated into an existing sales application and successfully deployed to end users.

Technologies used

  • Java 2 Standard Edition 1.4
  • IBM WebSphere 5.1
  • IBM MQ Series
  • Java Swing
  • Web Services
  • Apache Axis
  • Java Web Start