VHI (www.vhi.ie) is Ireland's largest private health insurer. VHI had implemented a Tibco BPM solution to streamline its claims management processes. However the company was experiencing two key problems in its operational use:
- Service availability. The system was often unavailable at the start of the working day, leading to delays in processing claims and reducing employees' efficiency.
- Housekeeping. System performance was being degraded because the appropriate housekeeping had not been put in place.
To address problems, Sciamus put in place a support operation that not only provided support to deal with bug fixes and service outages, managed via a strict service level agreement, but also took a much more proactive approach to support, specifically:
- Carrying out a series of "start of day" checks to ensure that the system was available before the start of the VHI working day.
- Implementing a standard regime to carry out housekeeping on the system.
This led to a step improvement in service availability and system performance. Furthermore, costs to the customer were kept to a minimum by setting up a remote support facility in Sciamus' offices in Prague. The success of our approach is confirmed by Dermot Dwyer, the VHI project manager for the project:
"VHI Healthcare appointed Sciamus to support our Claims Processing BPM System in December 2007. Sciamus provide remote support for all components of this system (Tibco BPM, Oracle Database, Apache Tomcat Web Server and Windows NT Operating System). Previously, we could not identify a single supplier who could provide support for all these components. Having a single point of contact for support was a major factor in selecting Sciamus.
I have found Sciamus to be extremely professional in all our dealings. They have resolved support issues in an efficient and timely manner. They have also resolved numerous ad hoc requests from business users.
The time difference between Ireland and the Czech Republic allows Sciamus to remotely ensure that all BPM services are up and running one hour before our users access the application. This 'early warning' support process provides a level of confidence for our users."