Modernization of NTUC Income

Name

Institution Affiliation

Case summary

NTUC Income is the largest Singapore insurer having over 2 million policy clients and about $1.3 billion of assets. Up until a couple of years ago, the company was holding about 45 million copies of documents all stored in three warehouses containing more than 16000 cartons. Despite Income’s effort to upgrade the HP 3000 system, the company still encountered regular breakdowns that made it hard to retrieve and refile documents in the paper-based filing system. However, in the year 2003, the company made its first technological breakthrough by shifting to Java eBao system powered by eBao Technology. According to Simon (2013), the newly acquired software comprised three major subsystems that were strategic to Income- a module that could support new products, a centric design that provided integration with barcode and imaging technology, and new channels that could change business processes. Moreover, this system became a trusted source to store digital data that could be accessed by 3,400 insurance advisers and about 500 internal staffs.

Problems that have been faced by Income in the case and the new system has solved them

The insurer experiences significant drawback in processes due to frequent failure of its HP 3000 mainframe that was used as the major host for insurance accounting systems and management modules. In addition to this limitation, HP 3000 system had a back-up and restoration limitation and could only retrieve and restore data from lastly backed-up data logs history. Frequent hardware failure characterized the system, and Income suffered downtimes of up to six days. Development of new products using COBOL programs was very cumbersome and could take weeks or even months to implement. Through the utilization of the new systems, these shortcomings were addressed by having a highly reliable platform. Consequently, communications lines were developed making a network that could solve downtime due to reduced hardware failure and reliable data backup (Simon, 2013).

Types of the information systems and business process that Income used before integrating to the fully digitized system

The processes were very intensive and paper based. The clients filled forms that were then sent by the courier services to the service office for logging and sorting and back again...