Ardanta - the right documents guaranteed

About Ardanta

Ardanta specializes in funeral insurance, which involves relieving the burden and stress of arranging a funeral from their policy holders’ relatives. With more than half a million policies, Ardanta is one of the biggest funeral insurers in the Netherlands and is a subsidiary of Fortis ASR based in Enschede.

Ardanta’s Issue

For an insurance company like Ardanta, documents and correspondence play a vital role. The processing of policies, correspondence and pre-printed giro credit slips is an essential part of their business process in which accuracy and speed are key.

Harry Kesler, Chief Information Officer explains: ”At the end of the nineties we were confronted with the limits of our existing information systems. We started developing a new administrative system, partly based on an existing infrastructure provided by our head office. For the document management system we wanted to integrate a standard solution rather than develop a solution in-house. We had clear ideas about the required functionality and technical characteristics. These criteria formed an important part of our decision making process. Naturally we explored the existing knowledge-base within Fortis and discovered that a subsidiary already had good experiences with ITP from Aia Software. After a thorough investigation it became clear that ITP offered everything we were looking for - and even more. This made the final choice very easy.”

Aia Software’s Solution

Starting in May 2003, ITP is now fully implemented in the front- and back-offices. The system generates output, based on changes in the system: in the front office data from customer contacts is entered and updated. If required, ITP processes this information immediately in relevant documents, and the output is instantly available. ITP generates back-office documents automatically. About 90 to 95 % of all outbound documents, averaging around 30.000 documents per month, are produced by ITP.

Technical infrastructure

In 1998 Ardanta opted for a Service Oriented Architecture: applications mutually share data in XML format with MQ Series from IBM. Harry Kesler: “The different parts of the application are distributed over four different platforms: mainframe, AS/400, RS/6000 and Windows 2000 Server. Executing all mutual communication in XML ensures we have great flexibility when it comes to replacing or adding servers."

The result

Harry Kessler states: “We are very pleased with ITP. The most important thing is that we can easily manage and change our documents internally. This means that we can operate independently from our supplier but can refer to them for assistance as and when required. ITP’s performance is excellent and now I have come to think of it, over the past two years since we implemented ITP, I haven’t experienced a single operational problem! As far as the future is concerned, we expect customers to use the internet more and more. We are thinking of possibilities such as giving online access to policies via a username and password or sending the yearly augmentations via email. This functionality is already available in ITP and no additional investment is required."

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