Credendo

The customer

Credendo is the official Belgian export credit agency. Its mission is to promote international trade relations, providing companies and banks with trade credit insurance against medium- and long-term political and commercial risks worldwide.

This business mainly relates to capital goods, contracted works, industrial projects and services. An important part of the insurance process is the evaluation of insurance requests, looking at the feasibility and determining the pricing.

At Credendo, the underwriting and account management department carries out this evaluation of these often-sensitive and complex cases. From a commercial point of view, speed and accuracy of evaluation are of the utmost importance.

During the process, information from multiple sources is assessed and consolidated. Credendo was looking for a digital solution that could provide an integral and transparent overview of the decision-making process. Other parts of the insurer have a digital workflow, but this part of the organization was still largely working with a paper-based administration and locally stored files.

This wasn't efficient for the people handling the cases. It also made it difficult for management to determine the department’s performance. It was time for a change, and AMPLEXOR was called in to give them the digital case management solution they needed.

Delivering the new tools to the underwriting department on time was extremely important, as Credendo wanted to decrease the time spent on evaluating insurance requests and create a transparent workflow that provided insight at every step of the process. This introduction of a case management system instead of a pure process-driven business process management solution was a crucial challenge: It would decrease the complexity of the workflows and increase the agility of the department.

The challenge

When Credendo sent out the request for proposal (RFP), it included detailed workflows. It had also already performed an extensive business analysis.

This made it easier for AMPLEXOR to propose a solution that would exactly match the customer’s request. Looking at the RFP, Hyland suggested some extra functionality that could improve the design even more.

Credendo’s business analysis was used as a very good starting point for the functional analysis performed by AMPLEXOR and validated by a selection of key business users and transformed into a technical design and analysis as input for Hyland's developers.

At this point, it was determined that the solution would need to:

• Manage digital documents within a case
• Support the operational activities using case metadata, reminders, activities, history and simple workflows
• Support the daily case-related activities and guide users by providing them with a complete overview of cases, their documents and related activities/tasks and reminders
• Possess flexible reporting functionality, including Excel exports

An important extra requirement was that the new case management solution could interface with an existing SAP solution, which is used as a financial information database. As Credendo wanted to retain this, Hyland set up a lightweight integration to import master data from SAP into the Alfresco platform.

The solution

The project for Credendo is a textbook example of how having a dynamic and excellent working relationship between technology provider and customer can lead to impressive results in a short space of time. As usual, we used an agile approach during the project, with short "sprints" during which specific components are built, tested and feedback is given. This approach works very well if the customer is very engaged during tests and discussions, as was the case here. In fact, Credendo assigned its own project manager who started work on this project six months beforehand to ensure that all communication between the company and AMPLEXOR went well.

To ensure the best feedback was received during the agile sprints, an internal "ambassador" was appointed for each involved sub-department to provide input to the project manager. This method had the added advantage that these ambassadors could inform and train their colleagues and bring back to AMPLEXOR possible concerns from these future users.

As the new case management solution would have quite an impact on the workings of the department, having these ambassadors involved at an earlier stage helped in change management and getting everyone on board right from the start.

What also made this project easier was Credendo defined the 60% to 70% of functionality that was required in the solution. The remaining 30% was divided into "Shoulds," Coulds" and "Won’ts," which would be built if budget and time allowed. This was a great advantage, as it helped everyone to establish the correct priorities.

In the end, Hyland managed to build nearly everything within budget, sometimes using workarounds. The technology base for the case management solution was Alfresco, a powerful and versatile open-source solution. Credendo was already working with the software, so they chose to continue working with Alfresco. The company also would supply and maintain the hardware, while Hyland provided disaster recovery and security procedures, which were tested extensively.

The difference

The case management solution for the underwriting and account management department was very well-received. Search and reporting features allow users to retrieve sets of specific cases, documents, reminders, history items and workflows based on metadata searches. The reporting features allow for a transparent follow-ups of case handling, which was an important request from Credendo's management.