Below is the 7th of 11
AIG has designed and developed a web-based, multilingual administration system to provide end-to-end support for both profit center and claims for its extended warranty system around the world.
The system has enhanced the way the multinational insurance company does business by providing a common platform that delivers the same code base in each country without modification.
Global profit center executives governed the project along with global claims executives, region liaisons, country liaisons, the project management office and IT management.
Business users actively participated in designing the global warranty framework, reviewing all the business requirements and collecting the local country requirements. They also signed off on the product after thorough testing of the application.
Fifty IT employees, who worked with external IT services companies on development and deployment, staffed the project. It took five years for all features to be developed and deployed to 25 countries.
Project team members used a Java/J2EE framework to develop the system. The entire product was built internally using agile development.
One key challenge for the IT team was migrating data from the existing system to the newly built system. Using bulk load tools, the team tackled this challenge by developing wrapper classes to convert the data from legacy to the new format.
Production coordination for new versions for all 25 countries was another big challenge. To isolate the issues from country to country, each country’s app instance and database instance was deployed separately.
The new system has allowed AIG to substantially grow while avoiding increased headcount. Since the system is used in 25 countries, there is economy of scale, allowing the company to share development, deployment and support costs, which it estimates has saved millions of dollars.
A critical factor in the success of the project was the active participation of the global office, regional liaisons and country liaisons in the requirements gathering process. This enabled a common platform to function across disparate countries.
