Royal London’s Scottish Life Secures Its Own Future with a New Itanium-Based solution from HP and Oracle - Business Perspective

The Business Challenge

Scottish Life, founded in 1881, is a major provider of pension fund products, and serves more than 540,000 customers with a dedicated team of more than 1,200 employees. It is part of the Royal London Group which, in turn, provides an even wider variety of insurance and investment products and serves more than three million customers As an overall enterprise, it manages £30 billion of assets for those customers through an employee base of 2,600.

In the pension fund industry, careful attention to prompt, efficient, and thoughtful customer service is an absolute requirement. For Scottish Life, that care has been honed by 125+ years of experience and a dedicated professional team who knows the importance of providing the highest quality of service from the moment the first payment is received to the moment the last payout is delivered.

Scottish Life also prides itself on the use of innovative technology to allow advisers, employers, and policyholders secure access to deliver that service, through availability of policy information 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Understanding that it must respond promptly to all its stakeholders, Scottish Life invested in a then advanced information management system in 1993. It took more than five years to develop, and required a complex set of mainframe-based software and hardware to manage, which served the company well for a number of years. After about ten years and through a period of significant business and pension fund asset growth, the system was now managing 750 million data records, with a software base surpassing ten million lines of code to support them. Up to 1,800 batch jobs ran nightly with an estimated 64,000 business rules governing the distribution of up to 30,000 print images each day. A performance monitoring and intervention system was also in place, supporting the activities of more than 500 users.

Even with regular upgrades, what had originally been an efficient solution was running very slow and maintenance was awkward at best. Internal staff and external users experienced a growing number of interruptions as their on-line service requests competed against transaction and background batch processing. Overnight batch jobs frequently ran longer than 12 hours, forcing scheduled and ad hoc business processing to be postponed until the weekend.

With more compromises being made every day - from changing business processes to accommodating the aging IT infrastructure to implementing further patches in its software and hardware - it was clear a more dramatic intervention was needed.

The Solution

The problem Scottish Life faced was to preserve its existing data records, move to a new system that could more rapidly process the information from them, and migrate from a system with often custom-developed applications requiring extensive code to a more modern system.

To do that, Scottish Life turned to MSS International, a migration specialist, along with a team consisting of Itanium Solutions Alliance Member Micro Focus, Charter Member Oracle, and Founder HP. With their help, Scottish Life began its work by assessing the complexity of moving its massive infrastructure - databases, business rules, operational activities, and disaster recovery. In addition to requiring a considerable amount of customization, Scottish Life also needed to replace their existing system software packages with a set of completely new operational support utilities.

Scottish Life concluded its decision process by selecting an HP Integrity Itanium-based solution as the core for its new production system. The legacy Pension Fund applications were converted using special software from MSS International to convert them into Oracle PL/SQL, C & Micro Focus COBOL, which was then able to run on any open platform. That paved the way to implement Oracle 9i solutions to replace those older solutions, using the converted databases.

To deal with the challenges of rapidly changing on-demand access to its data, the solution also included setting aside part of the HP Integrity server computing power for Instant Capacity on Demand (ICOD), a feature of the HP Virtual Server Environment.

Although it required critical teamwork and tight coordination at all times, the complete migration project took only 18 months to complete, and the cutover between the old and new systems was carried out in a single weekend - with no additional user downtime.

The Results

After the transition to the new system, production tests showed dramatic improvements. Batch runs were completed four hours faster than in the old environment, leaving far more time for responding to real-time customer requests - even without the dedicated processors set aside for such demands during peak usage periods. This also extends opening hours for both internal and external clients of the system, allowing for better support and the capacity for adding even more customers to the mix.

Further, with a more flexible and streamlined solution, the operating costs for the new system over the next five years are now projected to be only half that of what the previous system would have required. That represents a savings of £11.7 Million, allowing for further investments in new products, programs, and even higher levels of customer service in the future.

As of the fiscal year ending in 2006, Scottish Life closed the year with an increase in sales of 8 percent - due in part to the power of its new IT solution - and the launch of its major new Pension Portfolio product line.

Testimonials

"It has been a very successful project and has provided a huge return on investment." -- Ian Chapple, IT Director, Royal London Group