Hitachi Consulting UK Completes Bupa Technology Transformation

Thursday, 26 November 2009 16:54

London – – Hitachi Consulting United Kingdom today announced that it has completed the second phase, including warranty period, of Bupa UK Membership’s comprehensive technology transformation project, known as SWIFT Phase 2. The project, which is the largest .NET Smart Client commercial application in Europe, successfully went live in August within Bupa’s Corporate and Personal insurance business unit. The massive legacy migration exercise replaced numerous legacy systems with a single advanced Solutions Platform. Built on a .NET architecture and an Oracle 10g database, the new platform is designed to provide Bupa with lower total cost of ownership, faster and easier systems changes, and reusable components to dramatically reduce timescales and enable reuse of key functionality across all business units.

The project is part of Bupa’s programme designed to implement new business processes which include: enabling faster introduction of more flexible health insurance products; standardising the business processes and technology used to allow more flexible staffing; streamlining systems to eliminate duplicate data entry and accelerate processing (e.g. reducing time to invoice to less than one day); reducing payment of invalid claims through codification of all policy rules; improving customer service through better and faster access to information and processing; and improving overall management information. SWIFT Phase 1 included the technology transformation of Bupa’s business unit responsible for small-to-medium-sized companies, which Hitachi Consulting UK successfully completed two years ago. SWIFT Phase 2 includes systems for all member records, claims handling, provider payments to hospitals, claims adjudication and quotations for Bupa’s Corporate and Personal insurance business unit.

“We had grown into a legacy IT environment that was 20 years old and we needed a complete update of our systems in order to keep pace with our current and future business requirements,” said Paul Bridge, Bupa’s UK Insurance Change and IS Director. “Making changes to the old system was an extremely complex and time consuming exercise, and it was difficult to get a holistic view of the data. Hitachi Consulting’s extensive experience of enterprise solution delivery, combined with their technical understanding and business insight ensured the successful completion of this project.”

More than 60 consultants from Hitachi Consulting UK worked on the project, which included business process redesign, custom development, business consultancy, testing, programme management, as well as project management. Hitachi Consulting UK oversaw the creation of more than four million lines of .NET code and an Oracle database containing over three billion rows of data. In addition to enabling the decommissioning of the legacy applications and a mainframe, Hitachi Consulting integrated the new technology platform with Web Servers and XML to connect to a myriad of other internal and external systems. The new system now supports 2,500 online Bupa users. Bupa has also retained Hitachi Consulting UK to provide ongoing support.

Steve Anderson, Managing Vice President Solutions at Hitachi Consulting added, “This massive technology transformation exercise is the latest in a number of strategic consultancy engagements we have completed with Bupa. SWIFT Phase two provides Bupa with a unified set of business processes to enable dramatic improvements in how the business operates, bring new products to market and holistically manage its data across the entire Bupa UK Membership. We’re delighted to help facilitate Bupa’s strategic business objectives and change management programme.”