To help insurer Steamship's customers become compliant with new legislation Future Processing developed an application for that enables the company to issue 'Blue Cards' to insured vessels allowing them to enter US waters.
Steamship Mutual is a specialist marine underwriter providing Protection and Indemnity (P&I) insurance to the world's shipping organisations. It is one of 13 P&I organisations that underwrite approximately 90% of the worlds merchant tonnage.
Steamship Mutual's IT department is responsible for supporting the organisation's business applications, infrastructure and communications systems. Like any services organisation, information is vital for both the day to day running and also the overall success of the business. The smooth running of its IT is therefore critical to Steamship Mutual.
From the 20th of February 2008, a change in marine law, meant ships from countries adhering to the Civil Liberties Convention, and are carrying more than 2000 tons of oil when entering US waters are required to carry a 'blue card' showing the vessel owner has adequate insurance for oil pollution damage. These cards are issued by marine P&I organisations, which had to be ready to do so at short notice. For many of them, including Steamship Mutual, this involved developing a new software application.
Until this point Steamship Mutual had developed all its own software in-house. However, the new 'blue card' law coincided with a business efficiency drive which involved redesigning many of the systems and updating processes. This drive led the IT department to take a strategic decision to outsource some applications in order to speed up the development cycle and tackle more projects concurrently. Danny McDaid, IT Director at Steamship Mutual, explains, "The development team was busy, but we still had software requirements to complete, so we decided to outsource to fill the gap. The 'blue card' application was a self-contained project and so seemed like a good place to start." Since Steamship Mutual was looking at outsourcing as a long term strategy it was important to build a strong partnership with an outsourcer and it was willing to invest time at the outset to ensure that this happened.
Before making any decisions about where to outsource to, McDaid and his colleagues asked their peers in other organisations about their experiences. The feedback they received was that with some offshore destinations the time differences could pose problems and they could experience high churn rates and a different working culture. Consequently Steamship Mutual decided that nearshoring would suit them better. McDaid comments, "We wanted something closer to home with a similar culture and time zone to us. We looked at several organisations in the UK, in Ireland and various Eastern European countries. From this we made a short-list of five companies and visited them all."
Steamship Mutual chose Future Processing for a range of reasons. McDaid continues, "Although several of the companies we visited scored highly for experience, certifications and process, Future Processing had the best development model. We were very impressed by the way quality assurance is built into their development system. They also offered very good technical expertise and fluent English. Members of my team spent two days with them and we felt that Future Processing was the best fit for us. We came away confident that we could develop a long-term relationship."
Using .NET framework, Future Processing developed an application that would allow Steamship Mutual employees to check the insurance of its customers and issue 'blue cards' as appropriate.
The application, written in ASP.NET 2.0 web pages, directly uses Steamship Mutual's Oracle databases developed previously for legacy insurance management systems. Future Processing was very careful when designing the 'blue card' application to ensure that specific data which must be shown to the users was processed as quickly as possible - something that can be hard to achieve when using an internet browser based system. While the database structure itself is also very complicated, Future Processing also had to make sure its usage was precisely defined. The development team did this through detailed discussions with the database administrators from Steamship Mutual.
McDaid comments, "Polish developers have very strong technical skills, partly due to the university system in Poland. It generates good technicians and this comes through in the work they do. I was very impressed with the skill level they demonstrated in developing the blue card application."
"The team's commitment also shone through during the implementation. They resolved any problems very rapidly and were very flexible. For example, late one afternoon we noticed an issue and by the next morning an engineer was on site at our offices and fixed it, without us asking, and at no cost to us. I felt they put a lot of effort into the project."
Since the Steamship Mutual team was busy it was important that any project management for the 'blue card' project did not distract them from their other work. McDaid explains, "We were looking to be involved as little as possible without losing control and I think we were able to achieve that." Steamship Mutual allocated one database administrator and one analyst (who was the project leader) to the project. In addition a systems integrator was also involved on a part-time basis.
Future Processing created a dedicated Steamship Mutual team with their own office within the Future Processing building. The team comprised of five developers and a project manager. Prior to starting work on the project the Future Processing team spent considerable time learning about Steamship Mutual's business and getting to know the employees they would be working with. Much of the success of the project management is down to the relationship that Future Processing and Steamship Mutual built.
McDaid adds, "I would advise anyone looking for an outsourcing partner to treat the tender process like employee recruitment. While you know the projects you will need them to work on this year, it is unlikely that you already know what you want them to work on next year or the year after, so you don't know exactly what skills you will need. But if the outsourcer fits with your organisation's culture and work ethic then they are likely to be able to do the work you require of them. Skills are important but many outsourcers offer similar skills; it's attitudes and cultures that are the real differentiators."
As a result of outsourcing the blue card project to Future Processing, Steamship Mutual was able to complete the project more quickly. "In effect we created a bigger development team that can be increased or decreased immediately as required," explains McDaid. "As this extended team are not permanent employees, I do not have to train them or provide accommodation and I don't need additional software licenses. I don't have worry about staff issues either. For me it's a great time and cost saving. In fact, all things considered it has been 50 per cent cheaper to use Future Processing than to either develop the application in-house or to outsource it in the UK."
Future Processing has a very advanced quality assurance programme and shared their processes with Steamship Mutual. Members of Steamship Mutual's IT department were able to learn from this and now they use the Future Processing approach for quality assurance training and consultancy in-house.
Since the completion of the 'blue card' project, Steamship Mutual has continued with its outsourcing strategy and is currently working with Future Processing on more complicated projects that affect its core business systems. McDaid concludes, "Because we have a dedicated team in Poland that we use again and again, the developers at Future Processing really have become part of our IT department. For us, I know that nearshoring with Future Processing is the right strategy to achieve our business goals."