Increased new sales by 40% with faster time to market and new lines of business
By standardizing processes and applications in its new Red Hat OpenShift environment, Employers has improved delivery times to both sales agents and customers.
This efficiency has helped Employers take advantage of new business opportunities. For example, faster quote generation means the company can now compete on price comparison aggregator websites. Employers has also introduced a new open application programming interface (API) to integrate with insurance technology (insurtech) companies.
Supported by these new revenue streams, the company’s new sales have increased by 40% over three years, and the number of quote requests received and processed has increased by 80%.
“Without this speed, we would have been left out of the insurtech market entirely. Introducing our API helped us capture around US$40 million in additional revenue in that space in the first year and a half,” said Shaw. “We’re seeing real financial impact from offering a greater degree of self-service for customers and helping our sales agents be more productive.”
Accelerated development with an agile, automated approach
A key part of this change in delivery speed is Employers’ adoption of new development approaches such as DevOps and agile, combined with simplified, automated insurance policy management.
Using the complex event processing (CEP) capabilities of Decision Manager, Employers streamlined questions and eliminated manual underwriter review. As a result, its policy processing time improved from 18 minutes to less than 2 minutes.
“Previously, we had to send out an email for each endorsement and manually process each one. Now, with an online tool we created, agents and customers can complete many endorsements without our intervention,” said Shaw. “Our customers can now do business with us whenever they want, wherever they want.”
Back-end automation capabilities have also contributed to faster delivery. The company uses Ansible Automation Platform to ensure configuration consistency and streamline host provisioning. The remote execution feature lets Employers execute ad hoc Ansible commands in bulk.
With these changes, Employers has expanded its work volume from 85,000 insurance policies per year to 106,000 policies per year. Now, at a 100-year-old business in a highly regulated industry, IT is seen as an advantage, rather than a bottleneck.
“Working with Red Hat has changed the way we do business from a traditional waterfall approach to agile, iterative work and automation. We can now deliver new features to our agents every two weeks—or every four weeks, which they prefer—instead of every nine months, without increasing headcount,” said Shaw. “With IT now closely aligned to our business goals, many of our competitors are chasing us to catch up in the digital space.”
Improved infrastructure portability and disaster recovery with enterprise open source
With its new cloud and Kubernetes environment, Employers has adopted a truly hybrid approach to IT infrastructure. Workloads can be hosted in a variety of environments to optimize performance.
“All new development on Red Hat OpenShift takes place in a private AWS cloud, but we also have workloads and applications running in Microsoft Azure, in IBM, and in Oracle,” said Shaw. “We can choose the best cloud for the task.”
This portability has also helped Employers enhance its disaster recovery approach. Previously, switching between its two datacenters for backup took 48 hours. Now, with multiple availability locations and multiclustering capabilities, the company can more easily move workloads to respond to server malfunctions. Additionally, Red Hat Insights and Ansible Automation Platform work together to automate remediation tasks.
“Before, stretch clustering wasn’t possible,” said Shaw. ”Now, with Red Hat OpenShift, we can easily migrate workloads while maintaining connections with other clusters on the original server. It’s a huge benefit to business continuity and stability.”
Built container, cloud, and Kubernetes skills with expert guidance from Red Hat Services
To support these new technologies and work approaches, Employers worked closely with Red Hat Consulting in hands-on, side-by-side tasks and training. In addition to online training and sales workshops, Red Hat Consulting incorporated guidance on DevOps practices from Red Hat Open Innovation Labs, a residency-style engagement where businesses gain the skills to adapt to agile, iterative workflows.
“We had no experience of OpenShift or Kubernetes. If we had built our new infrastructure on our own, it would have taken us a year to get our first app out,” said Shaw. “Having our developers work alongside Red Hat consultants was a great way to get training and implement the platform quickly.”
Additionally, Employers works closely with a Red Hat Technical Account Manager (TAM) as a single contact for quick responses to technical questions and issues across its Red Hat environment.
