British Friendly reduces risk and guarantees system availability with Actian Services and Enterprise Management Appliance (EMA)
Customer Company Size
Mid-size Company
Region
- Europe
Country
- United Kingdom
Product
- Ingres v9.2.3
- Enterprise Management Appliance (EMA)
- Enterprise Management Service (EMS)
Tech Stack
- Ingres Database
- ABF
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Productivity Improvements
- Cost Savings
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Database Management & Storage
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Infrastructure Inspection
- Predictive Maintenance
Services
- System Integration
- Software Design & Engineering Services
About The Customer
British Friendly is an income protection mutual company that was founded in 1902 to provide sickness benefits for commercial travellers and their families. The company is based in Bedford in the UK and has nearly £100m in assets. As an income protection mutual, the company exists solely for the benefit of its 15,000 members and has no shareholders to whom they pay dividends. British Friendly has an insurance product that has several thousand members who have paid into it and need to be honoured over the lifespan of the product - which means that it could take more than 40 years before all the policies are paid out. The members’ and payment details are managed through a M2000 insurance application which is written in ABF and is based on the Ingres database.
The Challenge
British Friendly, an income protection mutual company, was running an outdated version of the Ingres database (v2.6) for their M2000 insurance application. The company wanted to upgrade to Ingres v9.2.3 to benefit from the database’s new functionality and new hardware. However, they only had one administrator to manage the M2000 insurance application and lacked the internal resources needed to both upgrade to v.9.2.3 or continue to monitor the Ingres database to ensure their applications and associated systems continue to run smoothly. Furthermore, the company needed to ensure that their internal risk levels were not compromised by upgrading their internal systems.
The Solution
British Friendly engaged Actian Services to implement a long-term support solution that addressed their issues. The solution included the replacement of existing old hardware, management of their M2000 application written in ABF that uses Ingres, and upgrade of Ingres to a current version. Actian Services completed the upgrade to Ingres v9.2.3 and implemented a three-year Enterprise Management Service (EMS) which manages their M2000 application using Actian’s Enterprise Management Appliance (EMA). The EMA is designed to improve the reliability and availability of British Friendly’s Ingres database and M2000 application by proactively monitoring them to provide early warning of potential problems, and alerting them about any problems that occur.
Operational Impact
Case Study missing?
Start adding your own!
Register with your work email and create a new case study profile for your business.
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
Remote Monitoring & Predictive Maintenance App for a Solar Energy System
The maintenance & tracking of various modules was an overhead for the customer due to the huge labor costs involved. Being an advanced solar solutions provider, they wanted to ensure early detection of issues and provide the best-in-class customer experience. Hence they wanted to automate the whole process.
Case Study
Predictive Maintenance for Industrial Chillers
For global leaders in the industrial chiller manufacturing, reliability of the entire production process is of the utmost importance. Chillers are refrigeration systems that produce ice water to provide cooling for a process or industrial application. One of those leaders sought a way to respond to asset performance issues, even before they occur. The intelligence to guarantee maximum reliability of cooling devices is embedded (pre-alarming). A pre-alarming phase means that the cooling device still works, but symptoms may appear, telling manufacturers that a failure is likely to occur in the near future. Chillers who are not internet connected at that moment, provide little insight in this pre-alarming phase.
Case Study
Aircraft Predictive Maintenance and Workflow Optimization
First, aircraft manufacturer have trouble monitoring the health of aircraft systems with health prognostics and deliver predictive maintenance insights. Second, aircraft manufacturer wants a solution that can provide an in-context advisory and align job assignments to match technician experience and expertise.
Case Study
Integral Plant Maintenance
Mercedes-Benz and his partner GAZ chose Siemens to be its maintenance partner at a new engine plant in Yaroslavl, Russia. The new plant offers a capacity to manufacture diesel engines for the Russian market, for locally produced Sprinter Classic. In addition to engines for the local market, the Yaroslavl plant will also produce spare parts. Mercedes-Benz Russia and his partner needed a service partner in order to ensure the operation of these lines in a maintenance partnership arrangement. The challenges included coordinating the entire maintenance management operation, in particular inspections, corrective and predictive maintenance activities, and the optimizing spare parts management. Siemens developed a customized maintenance solution that includes all electronic and mechanical maintenance activities (Integral Plant Maintenance).
Case Study
Asset Management and Predictive Maintenance
The customer prides itself on excellent engineering and customer centric philosophy, allowing its customer’s minds to be at ease and not worry about machine failure. They can easily deliver the excellent maintenance services to their customers, but there are some processes that can be automated to deliver less downtime for the customer and more efficient maintenance schedules.
