Software AG 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 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 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.”