Royal Administration offers a complete range of automotive warranty and service
plans to auto dealerships and distributors for new and used vehicles to provide
protection against repair costs.
The Need
The Company had been running its entire business on a bank of fax machines coupled
with an office-grown MS Access application... to manage warranty claims administration
operations and virtually all of their warranty related information (in short, their
entire business). The in-house system had become nearly impossible to maintain,
modify or enhance, the system was crashing once a day, and performance and reliability
was causing unacceptable errors and delays in call center operations activity.
The Solution
PCA was contracted to solidify an existing application, and to restructure their
data for better reliability and speed. A primary task for PCA was to organize
the existing code and data in such a way as to better model the physical business
process to enable the company to establish rational business workflow. Sales
calculations, operational statistics, and even customer data and other critical
data were not being properly tracked and obscured much of this analysis.
Working
closely with operations personnel, PCA corrected problems with the data and the
application logic. Along the way, PCA exploited opportunities to efficiently
and economically optimize system performance. A comprehensive security management
system was added to help protect valuable data. Fax machines were replaced
by XML data interchange with their partners, and ASP.Net web services.
The result was a complete, end-to-end automobile service warranty sales
quotation and customer support management system. The system is built in MS
Access (front-end) with a SQL Server back-end database, and currently supports concurrent,
all day, every day use by ~80 End Users at Royal Admin corporate office. The
solution today manages over 1/2 million warrantee records (8 GB database) and is
integrated with their MAS 90 accounting system. The system produces accurate
reports for Insurance companies, sales commissions, dealers/distributors and Royal
Admin operations and management personnel.
With a stable, secure and robust application successfully running in production,
PCA continued to work on simplifying (rationalizing) their workflow processes,
isolating and reducing inefficiencies, and allowing the company to focus on improving
call center throughput per customer service rep. Fueled by new ideas to complement
their existing business, Management envisioned new opportunities to enhance the
application and develop useful features. As a result, Royal admin was
able to expand into new channels of business that the previous system could not
support. The PCA designed and developed solution is now central to the company's operations
and profits.