Unum Case Study

Vizone was appointed by UNUM to implement a performance improvement programme around its policy administration platform, whilst also improving the delivery capability of UNUM’s administration solution provider. 

UNUM Provident is the UK’s leading provider of Group and Individual Protection insurance, protecting over 1.7 million lives throughout the UK and 25 million people worldwide. A Fortune 500 company (currently ranked 251), they serving the needs of 171,000 businesses in the U.S. and U.K providing benefits for 42 percent of today's Fortune 500 companies.

During 2006, UNUM established a programme of work to review their IT architecture and ensure its strategic capability to support the future growth of the business. Members of Vizone were engaged to provide programme direction to several of the work streams including Performance & Scalability, functional capability and delivery capability of the policy administration platforms.

Vizone commenced the engagement and conducted an initial health check of the current state capability of the policy administration platform. Following the review and subsequent recommendations, UNUM commissioned an 18 month process and performance improvement programme to consolidate the strategic position of the platform within the overall architecture. The programme comprised the management of 28 people to deliver a series of system improvements to enhance the capability of the solution both in terms of increased and improved functionality to comprehensively support the business, but also through enhanced performance and scalability to achieve future forecasted volumes.

In addition, Vizone and UNUM invested significant effort in building and improving the delivery capability of the team providing the administration software. This involved a more collaborative relationship between UNUM and the administration solution provider, with the implementation of an effective stakeholder management process leading to the development and agreement of a joint and robust governance framework for delivery. Within this framework Vizone were able to drive against the delivery of the scope and milestones within each work parcel, and ensure that the software vendor was able to meet and subsequently improve on its ability to deliver to the agreed time, cost and quality acceptance metrics.

<< back to case studies