There are three major themes which will continue to drive Premex's IT strategy throughout 2008 and beyond, these being supply chain integration, customer added value and internal efficiency.
On supply chain integration, a number of 'industry first' launches will be made during 2008 and these will rely heavily on a newly developed technical infrastructure incorporating .Net technologies, a service oriented architecture [SOA] and XML messaging.
These technologies will allow our operational case management system to seamlessly interface, via a number of 'e-enabled' service offerings, with experts, instructing parties and injured parties and thus provide a number of added-value services which are simply not possible with more traditional forms of communication.
Efficiency across the whole Group is being facilitated by the development of 're-useable components'. Here, the objective is to develop software in a modular fashion so that it can be re-used many times in different parts of the organisation.
For example, an appointment booking system can be built in such a way that it can be deployed for arranging bookings between injured parties and experts, car owners and car repairers or insurance policy applicants and nurses. Developing software in such a way requires a greater amount of upfront design than usual, but the payback can be significant in terms of the downstream savings in development and support costs.
At the core of Premex's case management system is a workflow engine from Metastorm - a global leader in business process management software. This allows Premex to automate, with unerring accuracy, its core operational activities whilst at the same time providing for customer specific processing.
To provide the necessary continuity of service, a high degree of redundancy is built in to Premex's IT infrastructure. Should a disk or a processor develop a fault, our customers can be assured that we can still deliver a non-stop, quality service.