Insurance organizations are facing immense pressure to get into market before competitors, offer better customer experiences, and help employees work more efficiently.
However, outdated legacy systems, manual data entry, siloed ways of working, and a lack of resources often stands between these organizations and innovation.
HDI Global SE – who has 120 years of industrial insurance experience, a footprint spanning 175 countries and close to €9 billion gross in written premiums for 2022 – is no stranger to these complex challenges . HDI Global, The Netherlands (HDI), a regional branch of HDI Global SE, was in search of a new strategy to deliver digital solutions in 2017 in response to the demand for custom regional applications, disparate systems slowing the claims handling process, and the lag of aging legacy systems.
In 2017 HDI adopted Mendix and delivered their first application that improved the broker experience, centralized data, and delivered a new clearing house for claims. Since then, a HDI’s low-code strategy has evolved. Today, their team has 7 applications in production and has undertaken digital transformation efforts which includes hiring a digitization partner and rolling out a DevOps framework to a corporate model that’s weathered a century of business.
From pilot to improved process strategy
Central to the future-proofing strategy at HDI is the Mendix platform, which the insurance enterprise is using to:
Create a unified internal user experience from broker to HQ.
Reimagine the operational workflow to improve speed and accuracy instead of reproducing functionality—and pain points.
Encourage internal users to be confident working with technology and ready to continuously improve HDI’s customer experience .
Connecting to internal and external API’s or webservices
“Mendix can really help transform the way we work,” said Joost Boode, director of data, IT & digital transformation at HDI.
“Ultimately, we want to offer better customer service and have happy employees. I really think we can make a difference with Mendix.”
Joost Boode / Director of Data, IT & Digital Transformation
“Especially with our legacy systems and diversified IT landscape. We can optimize processes, increase job satisfaction and give employees the tools to provide better and faster customer service. Mendix is helping us move toward these goals already,” he added.
HDI’s first Mendix application, OneContainer, was a step toward unwinding complicated processes that slowed down underwriting and invited data errors. It replaced a grab bag of solutions that the enterprise’s operations team would have to collect broker transaction data from and then reformat before entering into their internal systems.
The application successfully streamlined those transactions between systems by creating clearinghouse access. As their first Mendix project, it also opened the team’s eyes to low-code’s potential and the promise of digital transformation.
“We learned a lot from setting up and using OneContainer three or four years ago,” said Joost. With the help of expert implementation partner Ordina and an evolving Mendix strategy, HDI has since replaced OneContainer with a new application – Mendix Beurs.
Mendix Beurs delivers an efficient and improved user experience from e-ABS —the Dutch industrial insurance exchange system—to HQ’s systems and databases. Mendix Beurs is much lighter and team members don’t have to spend as much time on data entry or other slow-moving and error-prone activities. Data is validated and processed directly, and only exceptions need to be handled manually.
In addition, as HDI’s enterprise-wide capacity for digital transformation grows, the business side of the enterprise can take more agency over its digitization projects—from suggested iterative improvements to the actual low-code development work.
“In the past, the Mendix development was completely external,” said Joost. “But now, we’ve taken the lead ourselves. We create a business case before building something and do it within our IT team, and we are working with a proper partner. I think these improvements reflect the success of Mendix.”
As an insurance organization serving industrial and large commercial clients, the electronic insurance exchange, managed by Vereniging Nederlandse Assurantie Beurs ( VNAB ) , or the Dutch Insurance Exchange Association), is a critical business channel for HDI.
VNAB manages the electronic exchange through their e-ABS application which handles the placement, claim, and clearing process between brokers and insurers. Historically, there was no connection between e-ABS and HDI’s internal systems, meaning that the translation of data between the two organizations was entirely manual.
To address this, HDI delivered the Mendix Beurs application in 2022 over three phases – building the claims notification , clearing, and placement processes.
One of the most impressive changes HDI delivered with the Mendix Beurs application came through automation and the Straight-through-Processing approach.
The previous operational requirements meant teams had to enter each new client and customer request into the system, which took excessive time and interjected a human where one wasn’t needed, increasing the possibility of error.
Now, Mendix Beurs serves as a connector between the e-ABS and HDI’s backend systems, and also includes a dashboard to manage the workflow of exceptions.
“Step by step we’re automating these processes, making them straight through so our internal users can focus on exceptions—the errors or red flags—instead of all this manual administrative labor, which is not adding any value.”
Robert van der Rhee / Enterprise Architect
“That’s quite a different way of working,” he added. HDI has updated nearly 95% of the claims process and is finishing development work on check clearing and financial handling automation. “About 80% goes through automatically without or with minimal manual interference,” said Joost. “Before, we might have unintentionally manipulated or corrupted data to fit it into our core systems. We’re not doing that anymore. If something is wrong with the data, we have time and availability to solve the problem.” Like many insurance industry enterprises, HDI has had to disrupt longstanding operational paradigms to prepare for a fast-moving future. Before building low-code applications with Mendix, HDI operations used to have extensive and error-prone data manipulation tasks to undertake whenever they had to make an update or fix an error.
“We had an application where every data grid was developed from scratch, and if you needed to change one thing, you had to change it in 60, 70, and even 80 different places,” said van der Rhee. “With Mendix Beurs, the developers choose to use the snippets functionality , and that’s way more maintainable.”
Instead of focusing on style guides and user interface customizations, the enterprise has accelerated access to better functionality by sticking closer to the Mendix Atlas UI framework , which takes a modular, composable approach to creating templates, page layouts, and design systems. This standardization in development further contributes to greater efficiency for HDI’s teams in current and future projects.
Modernizing development methodology
Incorporating a DevOps framework can be tricky when you are a small IT department for an industrial insurance enterprise. As digital transformation scales, the roles and responsibilities within teams sometimes blur.
However, HDI has made great strides to incorporate an Agile framework , Kanban, and Scrum and build a more collaborative culture between IT and the business.
“First of all, we worked to get the business to understand that there is a development life cycle,” said Bart Brandt, change and release manager at HDI.
“Then, we introduced the idea that the business is able to put in changes—that there is budget and capacity for that kind of change request. People are really driven to work, work, work. They think change will be done later—or not at all—instead of the other way around. We want to say first, let’s make some high-impact changes, and then we can go to work more efficiently.”
On the IT side, in addition to the wholesale changes to workflow and development methodology, a simple but impactful difference has come by asking the right questions before development work begins.
“This morning, we spoke about updating a process that requires a form. We can replicate the former process in Mendix Beurs or ask who needs this form. Where is it saved? Why is it saved?” said Linda Vink-Morée, DevOps product owner at HDI.
“If we follow old business methodologies, we just replicate the current process within our app, but if you ask those questions first, you’ll have a far more future-proof solution.”
Learnings from an early adopter
Getting people to think differently, to feel confident, and to look for ways to innovate or improve customer service starts with building the right processes.
“It’s difficult to apply a first-time-right principle when you don’t know what right is,” said Vink-Morée. “Before, if I asked enough of the right questions, we started building in the right feature—but only after we finished could the business tell us if that’s what they needed. But now we have a better process. It helps to have the scrum sprints to show what’s being built.”
Additionally, understanding that digital transformation means more collaboration in areas that IT departments traditionally cordoned off is a significant change for the business teams. For HDI, the obstacles to innovation are smaller and less threatening when the doorways of collaboration between business and IT are open and each side understands its role.
“If business users didn’t come to us with the ideas or at least, ‘Can you help me?’ then we wouldn’t know,” said Vink-Morée.
“These are business solutions, which puts business users in the driver’s seat. We try to facilitate the ownership. Tell me what you need and we will help.”
Linda Vink-Morée / DevOps Product Owner
Regarding engineering, HDI KPIs include increasing useability, reducing data errors, and helping the enterprise accelerate its operations. Some of HDI’s additional hard-won recommendations when approaching a low-code app project with Mendix include:
Keep it simple: Small, modular apps are easier to build and more composable than large, monolithic ones that are obsolete before they are finished.Keep it light: You don’t want a big, bulky container—keep your core clean and only hold data for as long as your process needs it.Keep it new: Don’t repeat core-system functionality. The enterprise’s capacity for change doesn’t allow for redundant work.Keep asking questions: Just because a process or functionality is already available doesn’t mean it fits within your roadmap or long-term strategy.
With the Mendix low-code platform, HDI’s internal team has a better holistic user experience from HQ-based legacy systems to the broker interactions on e-ABS, and improved user experiences translate into quicker processing times and reduced errors. As the team digitally transforms, they have more agency to enhance the change process and time to deliver white-glove customer service.
“It is rewarding to add value into our processes and help people to cut costs and increase quality with the best tools possible, and that is what we will continue to do.”
