References

AXA, France
"Product Factory" for AXA's Individual Life Insurance System
Activity: Insurance Carriers
Location: Paris, France
Organization: 300 individuals Life Products / 200 tables
Project Overview:
Objectives:
- Resolve the difficulty of having a different approach to each product (existing applications were cumbersome)
- Some of the product characteristics (around 10%) are not in tables, but embedded into the legacy software
- The launch of new products is cumbersome: table complexity causes delays and inconsistencies
Benefits to AXA France:
Without modifying the legacy system, Wyde's Product Factory has enabled the use of new user friendly applications created to modify or consult products:
- Understand the products
- Identify what is defined in the code
- Reduce the time to market when creating or modifying products
Why Wynsure was chosen:
Wynsure was chosen because it had been repeatedly proven faster to implement than competitive approaches and easy to customize to meet business needs.
Wynsure implementation:
Wyde's Product Factory was connected to the insurer's legacy system in order to:
- Model the carrier's products
- Import data from legacy tables
- Examine and compare products
- Create new products or modify existing products, including duplicating products
- Export modifications towards production tables
- Maintain product evolution history
Business Functions Implemented:
A set of prototypes was developed in 5 weeks, (50 man-days from Wyde and 20 man-days from the customer), with weekly iterations, to :
- Model the carrier's products
- Extract the 32 main tables (adding one table takes less than one day)
- Control consistency and report irregularities in product definitions
- Interrogate
- Compare
- Create new products
- Offer workflow functions
- Authorize users
- Create product marketing documentation
- Export into Excel
Technical Summary
Deployment Environment:
Quick deployment (5 weeks) because the Product Factory was designed from day one as a very powerful and highly integrated tool (3000 components) including components to interface with legacy systems.
The prototype was deployed internally (40man-days) to more than 100 users who were asked to secure access to the application's rich Windows user interface that is accessible through light clients.


