RSA Group uses Orbit to decommission legacy EDI platform
Flexibility of Orbit UK’s Managed Gateway for Insurance helps RSA deal seamlessly with having to decommission a legacy EDI platform
Flexibility and scalability are two important elements of any business solution. Its capability to cope seamlessly with changed business or economic circumstances is vital in preventing wasted time and investment. Requirements unforeseen at the outset of a solution’s lifecycle can cause it to be an expensive white elephant if it is unable to adapt.
In 2008 Orbit UK managed a project to move all of RSA’s EDI data onto their Managed Gateway for Insurance (MGI). At this time the service was used to consolidate RSA’s EDI traffic with no processing needed to be performed on the messages. The messages were received from and delivered to the same in-house EDI Gateway platforms that had been used previously.
Operating since 1710, RSA is now a FTSE 100 company, listed on the London Stock Exchange. The company is made up of a number of strong individual businesses including MORE TH>N and Codan and is organised into 3 main regions looking after 20 million customers worldwide.
Replacing a legacy platform
In 2010 RSA were looking to decommission one of their legacy IBM mainframe platforms. This would mean that the existing piece of software - XLATE - that handled the message translation on this platform needed to be replaced. At this point RSA approached Orbit UK to take over the message translation within the service they provided with MGI.
Chris Kenyon, EDI manager at RSA said, “We had worked very closely with Orbit before and so were confident that their platform could handle this new requirement.”
Work started on the project towards the end of 2010.Initially Orbit UK consultants developed a test map as a proof of concept to produce files in the same format that were being output from XLATE. Based on this, RSA gave Orbit UK the go ahead develop the full replacement solution.
Creating new maps
Existing EDI feeds were separated depending on their target system and specific mapping was applied to each feed to replicate the processing that had been previously carried out by the XLATE software. Unfortunately, the knowledge of the XLATE configuration had been lost to RSA over time. So Orbit UK consultants had to carry out an in-depth investigation and testing to facilitate a solution.
Equally for outbound Renewal invitation messages to brokers, Orbit UK had to populate the source EDI address according to a set of rules. Four new maps were developed for Household and Motor EDI messages and updates where required were made to two pre-existing maps that process XML messages and convert them to EDI for Motor New Business.
Policy View feature
“As we were uncertain as to the format of some of the messages, Orbit were working a little blind at the start of the project", said Chris. “Consequently, we had a problem with regard to Household messaging. But, what impressed me was that Orbit pulled out all the stops and quickly sorted a fix.”
As part of the implementation Orbit UK were able to apply their new Policy View feature which allows on-line searching and reporting of messages based on a number of criteria, such as Policy Number, Registration Number for Motor Policies and Postcode for Household policies.
Reduced licensing and support costs
The new mapping went live in April 2011, while the subsequent decommissioning of the XLATE software and the IBM mainframe allowed RSA to reduce their licensing and support costs, and to greatly simplify their Enterprise Architecture. With processing now being taken care of on the same Orbit UK platform as message consolidation, RSA are very happy with the outcome as Chris concluded.
“We were very impressed with the way the whole project was handled by Orbit. Everything went in very smoothly and we have not had a single problem with the system since we have gone live.”
Consolidating EDI data feeds
John Goodsell of Orbit UK commented, “Our Managed Gateway for Insurance enables insurance businesses to consolidate all of their EDI data feeds onto a single platform; and RSA initially took advantage of that.
“But, its real strength lies in the fact that new products and services can easily be added to it at any time so that organisations can reduce the costs and improve the manageability of their EDI processes.”
