Powering Business Transformation
Atradius embraces automation with help from Insight 2 Value
There’s more to trade than just the exchange of goods and services. To manage the risk involved, companies depend on credit insurance, surety and debt collection services. Only with these facilities can businesses trade with confidence and speed.
Atradius is one such insurance provider. Today, the multinational corporation serves customers in more than 50 countries. To protect its hard-won market share, Atradius is always looking to expand its reputation for excellence.
Paul Goossens, Head of Shared Services at Atradius, explains, “Customers tell us that our service levels are second to none, which is why we have maintained a high retention rate. To ensure that we continue to set ourselves apart from the competition, we initiated two digital transformation programs to enable us to run better, faster and more cost-efficiently.”
The two initiatives focused on updating the technology and processes for policies in the company’s credit insurance and bonding business lines. To realise the goals of these programs Atradius needed solid foundations.
“When kicking off the transformation initiatives, we assessed the technology that our employees, customers and partners rely on every day,” says Goossens. “One of our most important systems is for document management. We generate a lot of formal and legal files, from policy schedules to claims documentation, which must all be stored correctly and accessible to the right people internally and externally. Our previous system was approaching end-of-life, so we seized the opportunity to extend our capabilities.”
Specifically, Atradius decided to migrate disparate content from multiple geographies into one environment. Goossens adds, “Sharing information across domains is becoming increasingly important for guiding better strategic decisions. We wanted to build a global document repository with a common set of business content services, enabling greater efficiency and easier and more effective collaboration.”
Building on a solid partnership
To bring its vision for a new shared document system to life, Atradius looked to IBM Business Partner Insight 2 Value for help. As a long-term collaborator of Atradius, Insight 2 Value applied its deep knowledge of the company’s business alongside its expertise in business automation to design a solution.
“Insight 2 Value has been a strategic partner to Atradius for over 20 years,” says Goossens. “Every opportunity we have, we work with the Insight 2 Value team. Their culture is a natural fit for ours: they get things done and never oversell.”
Guided by Insight 2 Value, Atradius decided to modernise their estate by moving to IBM FileNet Content Manager, the market-leading content services solution, to manage, share and collaborate on content to save employees’ time and improve customer experiences. The company opted to implement the software in containers on the Red Hat OpenShift platform.
We were one of the first adopters of document image processing through our previous system, which was based on IBM FileNet technology,” comments Goossens. “That platform served us well for many years, so we were prepared to embrace bleeding-edge technology once again, and we knew we were in good hands with IBM software. We decided on a containerised approach to maximise agility and scalability.”
Atradius tasked Insight 2 Value with planning a migration that minimised impact on its everyday operations and ongoing business transformation initiatives. Insight 2 Value used its experience and know-how to migrate and rationalise the company’s existing 160 million documents securely and safely before making them available via a common set of APIs.
“As part of the project, we’re bringing two lines of business and users in countries around the world onto a single document system,” explains Goossens. “Thanks to the content federation feature built into the IBM solution and Insight 2 Value’s expertise, access to content is now completely transparent to users: they don’t need to know whether the document they want is stored in the old or new system.”
Facilitating Collaboration
Through its powerful new central shared services platform for documents, Atradius is giving its employees rapid access to customer information. The company has also gained the ideal launchpad for its business transformation initiatives.
“IBM and Insight 2 Value enabled us to accelerate document retrieval for employees so that they can serve customers more effectively,” says Goossens. “Our transformation programs will consume API functionality from the document system, making this project an important step in our evolution as a business. These innovations will help us maintain and grow our customer retention rate of 93%, building our presence in global markets.”
Working with Insight 2 Value, Atradius is raising efficiency by phasing out five document repositories across its international operations. The company has also brought together two lines of business onto a single platform and is seeing the benefits of a containerised approach on deployment timelines.
“Insight 2 Value is helping us to realise the full potential of IBM technology to simplify and streamline our content management systems dramatically,” comments Goossens. “The new IBM FileNet Content platform will be considerably easier to manage. With Red Hat OpenShift, we cut implementation times, changes and upgrades from weeks to minutes.”
Goossens concludes, “Before, we had to take an all-or-nothing approach to authorising different employees to view different documents. With our new IBM system, we can be more flexible and open but retain control. Alongside Insight 2 Value, we look forward to investigating what else IBM’s Automation capabilities can offer as we enter a new era for Atradius.”
