The Business
With sixteen branches in Southern Africa, Etana is South Africa’s largest dedicated business insurer, providing specialised risk management services and is a one-stop shop for all business insurance needs.
The Client
Marcel Wood, Head of Risk Management, Etana
Galina Kroucheva, Head of IT, Etana
The Challenge
To deliver consistently top quality risk surveys and risk improvement recommendations across Etana’s Southern Africa operations despite the critical skills shortages faced locally, and replace and automate onerous and ever-growing paper processes to achieve faster turnaround time and make survey results easy to analyse.
The Solution
A bespoke solution integrated to Etana’s master client and policy database consisting of the following components:
The dynamically intelligent web-based tool provides a fast, efficient way for field surveyors to conduct consistently high quality physical inspections and produce high quality survey reports. Surveyors need access onsite to up-to-date information from Etana’s central risk and client databases, but may find bandwidth limited or are not always be able to get online outside of main centres in South Africa. The technology selected and interface design of the module caters for this whilst still providing rich user functionality. Reference data is cached locally to minimise network traffic and whether connected or not, surveyors need not miss a beat if connectivity is patchy.
The high-value, confidential nature of many of the risks assessed makes information security a priority, and this is designed into all levels of the solution.
The central risk management team is able to control both the quality and the processes of conducting and following up on risk management surveys. Branches and business teams needing survey results and risk scores are kept informed and have access to the reports they need.
Why build?
“There was simply no other option to get what we wanted, in the way we wanted it done.”
The Experience?
“We received superb service from InnoSys. They delivered what was promised and any issues were rapidly resolved. InnoSys is technically highly capable and delivered enterprise strength software. InnoSys also understand insurance well making it easy and cost effective for us to implement new ideas and system enhancements. We achieved close collaboration between our business system owner and the InnoSys team, which resulted in real value being delivered as well as happy users. We are very pleased to have InnoSys as a technology partner.” [GK]
The Benefits?
“We are faced with a critical skills shortage in South Africa and this kind of IT solution goes a long way to making the best use of the expertise we do have, across our organisation. Thanks to the excellent insurance industry experience of InnoSys and their technical skills and quick grasp of our vision, we have a solution that eliminates human error and delivers consistent excellence. We have improved our service levels to our branches and our service to our clients whilst containing costs. We are extremely satisfied with the results.” [MW]
