Summary
The client, Fiji National Provident Fund is a social security savings scheme jointly supported by employees, employers and government. It was set up in 1966 to provide financial security for workers when they retire at the age of 55. It also provides two other main contingencies prior to retirement when the member is incapacitated and is not able to work, and for the financial support of survivors in the unfortunate event of Death of a Member. Over the years the Fund has evolved into a comprehensive scheme that provides a number of pre-retirement withdrawals to members for home ownership (Housing Assistance), healthcare (Medical Assistance), and Education assistance.
Business Challenge
Several business audits came up with largely similar suggestions. One of them was to enhance the company’s customer to key stakeholder contact and coordination. Having vast organization hierarchies it had information storage and flow issues. Also security was a big concern due to competitive scenarios. Their customers had limited options to interact through their website hence found it difficult to put their demands across. Also the top management needed a real time info system because their decision-making was getting affected.
Project Highlights
Based on best practices framework, we started with smaller milestones and created a self verification process by which very less changes were required to be made after the completion. The focus was not only on top-line growth but also on big CAPEX and OPEX savings. We built an IT strategy framework that incorporated reusability of modular IT services enabled by the use of an SOA approach to design to influence greater market share. Domain, Technology and Project management experts from C Ahead worked on a flexible design of the architecture. Sustainability, Scalability and High availability options were also built into the architecture model.
Benefits
- Around 2.5x increase in market share in the first 5 months of implementing the methodology
- Greater than 50 percent reduction in time required to develop new services and features.
- A 30% reduction in operating costs, enabling the distribution of low cost policies to rural, lowincome households.
- Avoidance of millions of dollars in capital expenditures due to lessened requirements for branch and call center build-outs.
- Increased standardization.
Learnings – These are the inputs we gathered as useful
- Information maturity builds gradually over a period of time
- Client team may not be always clear about all the objectives so it’s our duty to make them aware
- Project Management templates should get modified as per each individual customer