BUPA has awarded Edenbrook a two-year £5m contract to
develop new Microsoft .net-based systems to support its private
healthcare business.
In 2004, BUPA embarked on the development of a new system to
support its membership business in the UK.
The business was supported by over 70 primarily mainframe-based
systems, which were expensive to maintain and difficult to change.
The challenge was to provide a modern, flexible, scaleable solution
to support business growth, manage benefit spend and to provide a
better service to members.
Following a successful project to re-engineer BUPA
International's systems to a service oriented architecture using
Microsoft's .net framework and an Oracle database, Edenbrook was
hired in December 2004 to complete an analysis of requirements for
BUPA UK's SME business. The contract was then extended to cover the
whole of BUPA UK's insurance and membership services.
John Lister, BUPA chief information officer, said, "We chose
Edenbrook because of its extensive experience of enterprise
solution delivery. Its modern approach to development coupled with
detailed technical and business understanding ensures we are able
to achieve our challenging business and IT transformation
timescales, whilst ensuring a high quality system that meets the
real needs of the business."
The project is expected to run through to 2007. The new systems
have been designed to ensure common business functions can be
re-used throughout the business using web services. These web
services are used by BUPA's customer facing web systems and will be
combined to support configurable business processes.
The systems are accessible via the internet and have a user
interface developed with Microsoft's .net Windows forms. This style
of smart client application allows users to access the system via
low bandwidth connections, whilst providing self-patching software
and caching to ensure easier maintenance.