Allstate Insurance
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Overview |
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Clients:
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Industry:
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Business Challenges:
Ensure smooth deployment to increase user acceptance
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Services Delivered:
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Results:
- Reduced system response time by 95%
- Eliminated functional errors
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In the United States, Allstate is the second largest insurance provider and a brand that is well known for being trustworthy. The firm serves more than 16 million clients and generates nearly $30 billion in revenue annually through its network of over 12 thousand independent agents. With such a large extended enterprise, Allstate selected the Siebel 7.04 Call Center product to manage these all-important partner relationships.
Allstate invested in this system because they viewed it as a strategic barrier against their competition; it would help them maintain their customer base and help them to gain market share. As such a key component to Allstate's enterprise operations, the Siebel system had to run well from the moment it launched in order to gain acceptance from clients and agents and to deliver on the full power of its promise. The system was designed to support 20,000 customer service and branch representatives in a Call Center environment.
Challenge
Of course, as with any system that is integrated throughout a large enterprise, optimizing performance can be extremely difficult. Retrieving data from a wide range of sources and delivering it in an actionable manner has any number of hurdles that can cause errors or reduce performance. When the Siebel system was first deployed in the Pre-Production environment, functional errors were common place and routine queries were running upwards of 60 seconds.
FocusFrame was brought into the engagement to provide expertise in validating the system and tuning it to run at an optimal level. In this case, FocusFrame was asked to help create the system validation best practices, create and execute a tuning program, and analyze the results of the tuning exercise for feedback to the development team. The overall goal was to tune the system to achieve the service level agreements it promised.
Action
FocusFrame employed the company's proven APT™ Methodology to manage the validation and optimization efforts from not only a technical perspective, but a business process side as well. The team created scenarios that accurately modeled the business objectives a user was likely to accomplish along with the underlying technical architecture required to deliver this objective. This enabled the validation of processes to be run while considering the system as a whole, not just as isolated portions.
The methodology employed in the validation and optimization efforts forced a strict discipline that matched and enhanced the development process. Once a test was executed, the results were analyzed and compared with expected results from similar systems. Changes were then made to the system to improve performance, and then the tests were run again to determine the value of the changes. This was done on an iterative basis until the system was performing at its maximum level.
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APT in Action |
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Approach:
- Create and implement validation plan
- Tune system for optimal performance
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People:
- Expertise in application's underprinnings
- Experienced in tuning integrated systems
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Technology:
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Value Delivered
On May 21, 2003 the system went live as planned with much fanfare, but without any serious performance problems. The system responded to users within 2-5 seconds on most transactions. The routine queries that initially took 60 seconds in Pre-Production were now taking on average only 3-5 seconds. Functional errors were eliminated and system response time was reduced by 95%. All told, the system was easily able to perform well under the expected load and all service level agreements were met.
The implementation was considered a success by all. Users immediately took to the new system, which performed well even under the highest expected loads. "Thanks go to FocusFrame for your knowledge, commitment, and diligence on helping the Allstate Call Center project launch successfully," said Terry Shire, Engagement Manager.