Johannesburg, 12 Jun 2008
Players in the high volume, low profit mass market will know that the main challenge is effectively and efficiently managing volumes. Proper control of high volumes of increasingly detailed information is becoming a critical factor for survival and a prerequisite for companies to thrive in the changing business environment.
From a systems and IT perspective, the efficient and accurate processing of high volume (several millions), complex transactions is still best handled by powerful servers. The misperception that many of the proven mainframe and midrange machines are antiquated, obsolete or old fashioned, has resulted in many companies losing maximum processing efficiency.
Many of the new generation, 3GL technology approach systems, which are often Windows-based with a focus on visual aspects, do not offer the same powerful processing abilities, process disciplines or accuracy.
With the ease and speed of development many critical design aspects are ignored, as it is simple to change and even rewrite systems at a later stage. As a result, these newer technologies often result in delivering just the opposite to what is expected, being far more costly for business in the long run and even leading to the abandonment of great business ideas, due to the lack of operational capabilities.
The challenge is to re-define processes and create innovative approaches to the rapid development of technology and market communication channels.
In the insurance industry, insurance funds can simply no longer carry the entire spectrum of risks due to various factors. This is forcing insurers to look at new business opportunities in mass markets. The proliferation of communication and interaction channels into the lower end market has made new data and detail available for processing. Cellphones are a prime example of technology that has provided immediate access and a high level of technological sophistication to the masses. Other technologies, such as GPS and satellite tracking, provide risk carriers with critical, detailed information to correctly structure premiums to match risk profiles.
However, the growing volumes of increasingly detailed information must be processed efficiently to provide insurers with stable, reliable data in a sensible and useable format. This is an essential tool to meet consumer demands for less complex and more flexible products, immediate access and instant responses. Companies that cannot meet these demands will find themselves losing market share in a highly competitive industry.
The proposed solution and vital link between the insurer's information processing requirements and the consumers' demands is a Volume Business Management Methodology (VBM2) approach. It applies a rule-based structure enabling extensive flexibility that allows business users to adapt the system to business needs without having to change the base system, programmes or incurring large development costs. This, while retaining the detailed defined base system structures that enables the efficient processing of millions of transactions and terabytes of data.
A modular approach ensures that modules can continuously be added to the flexible base, providing additional functionality. This obviates the need to re-define an inflexible base and provides the ability to build on previous successes. A properly designed system provides a solid foundation to which application-specific new modules can be added to create exponential increases in functionality.
This flexibility provides mainframe type systems the best of both worlds. The real capabilities of mainframe systems are often more obscured by the legacy design of the systems, than by the hardware used to run the systems on. Even well designed large legacy systems, without inherent design around flexibility, are difficult to adapt easily, leading to further negativity.
Flexibility is the critical success factor in any system and achieving this flexibility in an environment where high volumes of information must be processed efficiently provides a great platform on which to build.
While powerful servers remain the best solution for processing high volume transactions, the fact that various other systems offer particular benefits and specific applications, cannot be ignored. The ideal is the integration of the functionalities provided by the various systems.
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