As consistently brilliant as our work is, there are times when certain projects can almost creep into ‘too good to be true’ territory. Saving hundreds of thousands of pounds a year territory. Our ongoing work with Themis a case in point.
BIG Money
A system that enables law firms to offer after the event insurance to their clients, where they can insure themselves against losing and ending up with expensive costs, the existing 5-year-old platform was not only creaking at the seams, failing to deliver sufficiently granular management information, but it was also extremely expensive to licence. Not just that, but much of the system had been superseded by new legislation and wasn’t even relevant any more.
In short, there was loads of room for improvement plus enormous scope for cost savings and so Simon and his team at Themis were tasked with finding the right development partners.
Creating an Ideal System
Searching for Microsoft accredited developers in the North West, Kaleida quickly showed up on the Themis radar.
Says Simon, “We approached a number of companies to look at the spec. Three got back to us. One was far too cheap and clearly hadn’t understood what we wanted. Another was OK but when Kaleida came back to us with a high quality, highly detailed proposal the decision to use them was very simple indeed. Not only did they read the situation brilliantly, they asked brilliant questions. Questions that really got under the skin of the project.”
Building a brand new system from the ground up using all Microsoft cloud enabled technologies to make it scalable, replicable and sustainable… all the bubbles, every process was meticulously examined and expertly implemented. Redundancies were cut away and essential functions added to create an ideal system.
Kaleida Collaborative
“It was an extremely collaborative process”, says Simon, “We knew that we needed someone to do ‘agile’ development. While we’d written a brief there was still a lot of working out to do, because the current system wasn’t owned by us we didn’t have access to the source code. There was an awful lot of research and analysis during the development. Agile development and sprints that worked really well. Testing each sprint and coming back meant we had a lot more flexibility in chopping and changing things, moving them about. Flexibility was the key. And that worked really well.”
Some of the benefits include improved management information, offer better quality policy information and improve the insurance service.
“We’ve got more detail, more accuracy, more flexibility and a much faster system,” says Simon. ”It’s a far slicker system. We’ve spent a lot of money on the new system, but that’s fine. It fits in with the build we’re looking at and the quality of the service and communications has been really good. I’ve been really impressed with Kaleida’s work. Absolutely excellent communications day to day with Andy and Alex.“
“I’ve been doing software for 30 something years now. I know what’s good and what’s bad and they’ve been really good. We must have been a pain to work with at times learning along the way as we didn’t know the complete system but they’ve been really patient, really flexible – we worked through it.”
