As Olivier Lehe, head of IT connectivity, innovation, CRM, and websites at Euler Hermes explains, “Our sales team needed more information about customers. They needed indicators showing financial flows that show the value of our services and information.”

The problem was that each department had dedicated applications and its own way of managing activity and information. “If we can’t integrate and aggregate this information, we can’t provide the right services, give the customer one unified view of their information, and as a company, we can’t speak with one voice,” says Lehe. Says Guillaume Compastie, IT project manager, “Our goal is to provide realtime data to empower Sales so they can provide relevant advice to customers.

And the final goal, of course, is to get customer engagement by allowing them to make the right decision at the right time.”

Euler Hermes selected the TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks™ integration platform. “We are part of Allianz Group, and many of its subsidiaries use the TIBCO integration platform, so having that synergy was very important, a competitive advantage for the Group,” says Lehe. “We compared integration platforms for over six months and came to believe that TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks was the best software for us.”

“Thanks to TIBCO technologies, our service-oriented architecture has simplified the way we provide data to customers. We can access data from various lines of business—credit insurance, claims, collections—very easily and very quickly,” says Compastie.

Simple, Powerful, Consistent, Worldwide Sales Presentations

“With the Smart Knowledge software we are developing for tablet computers, and the connectivity provided by BusinessWorks, a sales person can show data graphically so a prospect can see what we provide,” says Lehe. “They have access to various graphs and bar charts and can drill down to the details. Besides improving interactivity during a sales call, it provides transparency.

“The prospect can check the data, ask questions, and see the kind of information we have on the economy, country, market sectors, and so on. With real-time data access, there’s time to sell product to prospects. And we have one uniform way to sell. No matter the country, people are able to see the product and get information in the same way everywhere at any time.”

Time Savings

One of the biggest benefits for Euler Hermes has been time savings. “Sales and customers expect things faster. Some years ago, a good project completion was one or two years. Today, people expect it in six months, and probably in one or two years, they will expect projects within three or four months, maximum. And for that you need the right architecture. You need an ESB and the ability for flexible management of transactions.

“So now, with Smart Knowledge, sales people do not have to prepare a lot of analysis. It used to take six hours to collect data from our systems and analyze using Excel or other software. Now they have all this information directly accessible via the software.”

Reliable, Scalable, Real-time Connectivity

“The TIBCO integration platform increases reliability and scalability in our IT landscape,” Compastie says. “It provides several web services so our front-end applications can connect to our various backend applications regardless of the technology. With our previous software, we had around 50 web services, but they were not harmonized. With the TIBCO ESB, we have around 85 services that publish and subscribe, so they are all harmonized.

“With the former system, we were connected to five or six applications. Now we are connected to more than 20 front-end and around 18 back-end applications. We deal with seven lines of business, and the system handles 180,000 message transmissions per day.

“Smart Knowledge has real-time connection to the database, so it really provides a 360-degree view of the customer. We now have more than 600 tablets connected, and we monitor more than 45 million customers inside the application.”

“We want to engage more customers by providing all the data they need to make the right decision at the right time, and we also want to be able to anticipate their needs with relevant information,” says Compastie. “All our internal services that provide information on credit, risk, finances, contracts, payments, polices, can also be connected to other systems into the future.”