Business Challenge

A large insurance company had expanded its network ten-fold over the previous three years to support the IT requirements of approximately 20,000 employees, independent agents, and contractors, who serve more than 15 million customers from claim offices throughout the U.S.  The dramatic growth of the network and increased demand placed upon it by new Web services and applications had outpaced the organization’s ability to proactively manage network performance.  The performance gap was resulting in unplanned downtime, which was a threat to the company’s bottom line.  When an agent cannot provide a quote or smoothly file a claim for a customer, revenue is lost—not to mention competitive advantage.

Solution

Forsythe began by analyzing the insurer’s current environment to determine which tools would best suit their needs and how these tools should be set up.  Any application would need to conform to the organization’s internal help desk processes and procedures.  They also wanted to enhance these procedures, but needed the right tools to do so.

Based on its findings and the insurer’s plans for continued growth, Forsythe designed the architecture and provided implementation services for a state-of-the-art network management solution combining a suite of tools that proactively manage the entire network, and are capable of being scaled up as more businesses are launched or acquired.   Features of the solution include: easier access to more meaningful reporting on network performance from broad and segmented views; better service level agreements (SLAs) accountability; easy network access reporting by region; correlated two-way alerts via e-mail and pager to simplify and largely automate communication of trouble-tickets and response to them; automation of selected system updates; and change control—the ability to identify, test, and roll-out approved changes, as well as to go back and see how different changes affect system performance and access. 

Before deeming it complete, Forsythe tested the solution to ensure its effectiveness. 

Results

Today, the insurer is able to proactively, comprehensively, and efficiently manage its network, enabling it to spot and head-off potential problems ahead of time, thus minimizing costly downtime.  In addition, the company has already saved an enormous part of its budget by being able to see where bandwidth costs can be saved and where downtime can be avoided, and thus make more informed IT investments.