Manulife Japan: Application Management

Manulife Life Insurance Co. sells and services a variety of life insurance and annuity products for customers throughout Japan.

The company is a fully owned subsidiary of Manulife Financial, a leading Canadian-based financial services group serving millions of customers in 19 countries and territories worldwide. In 2008, Manulife Japan was recognized as the only life insurer operating in Japan to be rated AAA.

When it made the decision to outsource the maintenance and development of its NaviSys Front Office™ IT platform, it chose Accenture.

Manulife Japan clearly understood the value of using IT for competitive advantage. To manage its operations effectively and efficiently, Manulife Japan had implemented the NaviSys Front Office™ IT platform, which enabled front-office sales processing capabilities. To optimize the value of this application, Manulife Japan wanted to outsource its maintenance and development to a trusted third-party provider.

Accenture’s research has found that European and Asian life insurers—such as Manulife Japan—are more apt to consolidate their life insurance platforms and, in the process, achieve real strategic advantages that lead to high performance. Manulife’s decision to outsource the management of its main IT platform was supported by additional Accenture research into the characteristics of high-performance businesses. That research found that top insurers outsourced IT applications to reduce operating costs and—even more importantly—improve the quality of application development.

Manulife Japan selected Accenture to provide the application outsourcing services based on several factors: the quality of our outsourcing resources, the reputation of our Global Delivery Network, the Accenture Life Insurance Platform software (formerly NaviSys) and our Front Office application and our unmatched skills in understanding and managing the industry-leading software solution.

When we acquired NaviSys, Accenture assumed the maintenance of the legacy Front Office application for Manulife Japan and provided these services from Accenture’s North America delivery centers. Under the new agreement, Accenture conducted a two-month diagnosis to identify ways to help Manulife Japan reduce the cost of maintenance services.

A tremendous opportunity existed in transitioning the majority of the application maintenance service to the Accenture Delivery Center in Shanghai, China. In addition to reducing costs, the Shanghai Delivery Center offered highly skilled personnel who spoke Japanese. This would make communications with the Manulife corporate office easier.

To effectively manage service transition and delivery as well as manage service performance, Accenture leveraged Accenture Suite for Outsourcing capabilities and assets: The Rapid Transition Suite, Service Management Suite, Client Service Reporting and Accenture Delivery Methods for Outsourcing. Accenture also leveraged our alliance relationship with Microsoft to quickly establish the necessary technical environment in Shanghai to support the new application maintenance contract.

Accenture resources in Shanghai are managing the Manulife Japan platform application for five years. In that capacity, they assumed full responsibility for application maintenance support and all enhancements, from design to product test.

The transition of support to the Accenture Delivery Center in Shanghai is expected to result in lower application management costs. In fact, the cost is expected to be as much as 40 percent lower, on average, per resource than under the previous arrangement.

Business benefits for Manulife could include a lower expense ratio and ability to invest more in product improvements for its customers. Ultimately, the more efficient application management service can help Manulife increase market share through faster product innovations and contribute to high performance.

Learn more about what worked at Manulife:

Read about Accenture outsourcing services for life insurers
Executives embrace outsourcing as a mainstream management strategy for achieving performance improvements and productivity gains.

Discover how the Accenture Life Insurance Platform enables distinctive policy administration capabilities

The Accenture Life Insurance Platform is widely recognized by industry market watchers as one of the most complete insurance administration systems, with 100 percent production success rate, more than 100 installations, dozens of conversions totaling nearly 100 million policies and millions of policies administered in production each day.

For more information about achieving high performance in insurance, contact Accenture via e-mail.