Software AG, a global leader in business infrastructure software,
today announced that the Raiffeisen Banking Group and the UNIQA
Insurance Group have implemented webMethods BPMS from Software AG to
support their corporate growth strategies. The companies have
sought to grow their partnership to capitalize on the expansion of the
European Union as well as liberalization of the European financial
services markets. As a result, UNIQA has grown rapidly throughout
Central and Eastern Europe, with the company now serving twenty
international markets, including fourteen in partnership with Raiffeisen.
Software AG’s full-feature process design,
execution, monitoring and management solution is being used to better
serve this expanded customer base, to help integrate new acquisitions
and near-shore operations, and to keep pace with a rapidly changing
regulatory landscape.
Raiffeisen and UNIQA have worked with Software AG since 2001 to
implement a more adaptive business infrastructure based upon a
service-oriented architecture (SOA). This project has delivered the
agility, efficiency and accountability needed by IT to support the
companies’ growth strategy. According to Georg
Hahn, General Manager of Raiffeisen Software Solution und Service GmbH, “We
did our homework over the last five years and have consistently gone in
the direction of an SOA.” The alternative was
to have replaced their existing systems entirely, which represented “an
investment of 400 man-years” and would have
produced a “development freeze lasting two to
three years,” notes Karl Unger, a member of
the Executive Board of the UNIQA Insurance Group.
With an SOA-based infrastructure in place, the two companies are
expanding their deployment by implementing a comprehensive Business
Process Management Suite (BPMS) – Software AG’s
webMethods BPMS – across their
infrastructure. The use of a top-ranked BPMS allows users to
collaboratively create the framework –
business logic, rules and process models –
needed for transforming distinct services into more complex business
processes.
In the case of Raiffeisen, the platform is initially being used to help
automate their account and credit approval processes in a project
described as providing each employee with their own ‘electronic
assistant’. By automating a number of these
underlying process steps, Raiffeisen expects to improve their process
accuracy and responsiveness while ensuring that high-value employees are
focused on delivering high-touch service to the customer.
“The benefits of the project are extensive
and include improved customer response times, better customer service
and greater visibility into individual transactions,”
said Hahn. “For example, we’re
looking to provide customers with a ten-minute credit approval. By doing
so, we can improve customer service and capture more business. We can
also reduce our overhead as a ‘ten-minute’
decision is less costly to produce than a ‘three-week’
one.”
For UNIQA, this will allow the company to replace their current
sequential processing of applications with a parallel processing
approach. As a result, tasks can be distributed to different operational
centers, based on availability or expertise, as a means for reducing the
time required to complete the end-to-end transaction.
According to Unger, “After the successful
implementation of our SOA, we now have the challenge of combining the
individual services and providing our employees and management with a
better understanding of the status of the entire process. With the
improved coordination of the flow of both document and activities, we
expect to realize essential cost reductions while increasing
accountability via improved monitoring and control capabilities.”
About Software AG
Software AG is the world’s largest
independent provider of Business Infrastructure Software. Our 4,000
global enterprise customers achieve business results faster by
modernizing, integrating and automating their IT systems and processes.
As a result, they rapidly build measurable business value and meet
changing business demands. Based on our solutions, organizations are
able to liberate and govern their data, systems, applications, processes
and services – achieving new levels of
business flexibility.
Our leading product portfolio includes solutions for high performance
data management, developing and modernizing applications, enabling
service-oriented architecture, and improving business processes. By
combining our technology with industry expertise and best practices
experience, our customers improve and differentiate their businesses –
faster.
Software AG has almost 40 years of global IT experience and over 3,600
employees serving customers in 70 countries. The company is
headquartered in Germany and listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange
(TecDAX, ISIN DE 0003304002 / SOW). Software AG posted total revenues of €621
million in 2007.
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