Pacific Casualty & General Insurance (PCG) is an insurance underwriter specializing in providing coverage to relocation agents and freight forwarding companies who transported domestic goods and personal effects in Asia. With an app developed on top of ourDB, they just started (2017 Mar) to allow end-users to fill in and submit their oversea or inland insurance proposals online through their affiliate packers in Asia, and both PCG and the packers can manage proposals also online, having eliminated a lot of paper works and redundant, time-consuming procedures.
When looking back to the very beginning of the project, there were a lot of challenges:
- a lot of users will be using the system - more than 120 affiliate packers and for each packer, on average there are more than 100 clients; that is, more than 12,000 users
- tight budget - PCG would like to use the system to test the water, seeing whether an online platform could streamline their overall operation, making their underwriting processes more efficient and more effective. Because this is a kind of pilot project, budget control is essential, or else too much money has been spent on something which needs review or even termination at last. There are some alternatives:
- Google Form: it's free and yet there is no sophisticated data access control and workflow customization
- Microsoft SharePoint: the solution is highly customizable and yet the final architecture for the solution is too complicated and the resulting consulting and implementation cost is certainly out of their budget
- system scalability - if successful, more and more users will be using the system. So the processing power of the system must be scalable
- system extensibility - as stated, after the system is launched and in some point of time, the system surely needs modification, perhaps adding more workflows or adding more features, to cater their business expansion - unless the business has no changes. Therefore the system architecture has to allow technical adjustment to meet market needs within a short period of time and preferrably within little extra resources
Having started to run their online insurance proposal system on ourDB, PCG keeps in touch with affiliate packers, as well as mindVan Connection, to on and off review the overall workflow of the whole system and to ensure that the system can meet the operation needs. Thanks to the agile development architecture of ourDB, it's believed that even major amendments in the eyes of business, they are yet minor adjustment from ourDB perspective. Stay tuned with us and more updates about the system are to be posted here.