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Customer
123.ie
Paramount Court, Corrig Road,
Sandyford, Dublin 18
www.123.ie
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Background
Industry: Insurance
Solution: Replace existing methods of generating documents and automate on a central server. Integrate with existing infrastructure. Reduce dependency on IT staff. |
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Introduction
123.ie is the leading on-line insurance provider in Ireland offering home, motor, life, health and
travel insurance via their website and call centre. As an on-line insurance provider 123.ie need to
have a highly efficient IT infrastructure to move applications from their website forms and through
the back-end workflow. Their infrastructure also needs to be scalable to accommodate a rapidly growing
company of this sort.
There is a diverse mix of technologies in use in 123.ie with .NET being used mainly to power user-facing
back-end applications. Their main policy database runs on MySQL version 5 and most of their server
applications run on Java using either Tomcat or JBoss Application Server. There is a tendency to move
more towards Open Source technologies and products as the business needs dictate.
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"Inforama has made the task of creating customer documents easy for non-technical users and has integrated
seamlessly with our other backend systems. Not only that but it has also allowed us to make significant
savings on our day to day operational costs."
Geoff Boyle
IT Director 123.ie
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Background
Prior to adopting Inforama, 123.ie had been generating customer documentation with the help of Crystal
Reports. This approach was resource intensive as the IT department was called upon to create reports
as they were needed. Also the reports themselves weren't suited to creating free-flowing letters of the
sort required for customer communications. 123.ie also send out a large amounts of application forms
which need to be filled in by customers. This can be quite a lengthy and confusing task for customers and
it made sense that the forms be prefilled with customer information.
The Crystal Reports which were being created by the IT department needed to be integrated with the .NET
front end applications and in turn got deployed to each desktop machine running the applications resulting
in an administrative headache.
Requirements
123.ie wanted a document automation system that would allow letter templates to be created by non-technical
users with the ability to deploy changes without the intervention of the IT department. They also wanted to
pre-populate Acrobat application forms automatically from their main policy database.
Integrating with their .NET front-end systems via web services interfaces was also a basic requirement so
as to have as little impact as possible on their existing systems.
Creating Document Templates
Inforama studio is installed on the machines of users who create and edit the Inforama projects along with
OpenOffice which is used as the word processer within Inforama. The users simply create new letters or amend
existing ones and insert placeholders where customer and policy information should appear. Letters are written
in a familiar word processing environment with all of the functionality one expects from it such as font
formatting, line spacing, colours, tables and page breaks.
Similarly, PDF application forms are marked with database information and are pre-populated with data before
being sent to customers. These Acrobat forms are imported into the Inforama project and the Acrobat fields are
marked with database fields which should be used to populate them.
Deployment
Projects created in the studio are deployed to the JBoss Application Server running within 123.ie. This
deployment can be done directly from the Studio by pointing at the Inforama server. Alternatively Inforama
projects can be uploaded via the web interface directly onto the browser.
Once deployed the project configuration file just needs to be amended to point to the production database.
Other settings such as whether to use the in-build document repository within Inforama can be set.
Generating Documents
The .NET applications running within 123.ie needed to be changed to generate documents using Inforama via web
service calls instead of the Crystal Reports which were previously used. In most cases these calls send the
name of the document or document pack to be generated along with the ID of the policy which will be uesd to
populate the document.
Result
Inforama has increased the number of documents that are emailed to customers resulting in a significant
reduction in postage costs. The IT department is no longer called on when a document needs to be created or
amended. Inforama has paid for itself within months of being deployed.
View the PDF version of this case study
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