SOCRAM enlists SOA architecture backbone for faster, cheaper product launches

SOCRAM is a retail credit company specializing in car loans. The company currently has more than 300,000 loans worth EUR1.5 billion. SOCRAM is a wholly owned subsidiary of Mutuelle d'Assurance, a conglomerate of 10 mutual Insurance Companies that has some 12,000 Mutuelle d'Assurance advisors. Mutuelle d'Assurance insures 50% of all cars in France and offers financial packages that include both car loans and car insurance.

Business need
Faced with increasing corporate and market demands, SOCRAM needed an agile and responsive information system that would help speed product development and delivery timelines. The company needed strategic initiatives that would optimize its multi-channel loan approval business across the Internet and within its own extranet and back office systems. To do this, SOCRAM needed a solution provider partner that could help it achieve a number of tactical objectives - such as integrating components and implementing an Enterprise Service Bus and Workflow manager - that would ultimately support more strategic business objectives.

Solution implementation
IBM Global Business Services helped SOCRAM develop and adopt a three-pronged IT strategy that included implementing shared services with partners based on a standard SOA solution, a workflow system to support activity growth and improved application integration. The solution allows the company to add both internally developed new products and head office initiatives to its systems faster and more cost effectively. Increased integration and workflow monitoring also allows the company to better track development to ensure projects stay on track and are aligned with overall growth objectives. The solution helped optimize the company's multi-channel loan approval business, making business with its distribution network of 12,000 counselors more competitive.

The project involved a three phased approach. In step 1, the SOCRAM team worked with IBM to created a map of the company's architecture and conducted a review of all business processes. The IBM team then created a transformation roadmap using CBM (Component Business Methodology) to highlight which key processes to transform as a priority, and SOMA to identify which services to be deployed first. Ultimately, SOCRAM sought to re-engineer key processes that would help the company differentiate itself in the marketplace. In step 2, the IBM team designed and implemented an ESB platform. Step 3 involved the automation of specific tasks through the orchestration of services and workflow.

Benefits
SOCRAM has successfully optimized its back office with SOA. This transformation has enabled the company to become more responsive to the requests of Mutuelle d'Assurance, its parent corporation. SOCRAM's time to market has improved and the cost of developing new packaged offerings has decreased. Dealings with SOCRAM’s dealer network have become more competitive with optimization of its multi-channel loan approval business.

Why it matters
Mutuelle d'Assurance's vision for the future and implications for SOCRAM: Today, Mutuelle d'Assurance is evolving into an "insurance-bank" organization, this is both a defensive move to protect its eroding market share, and an offensive one that gives the company the opportunity to develop a much richer portfolio of differentiating offerings. SOCRAM must evolve from a retail credit company into a fully operational bank by end of 2008. In September 2007, the company signed an additional EUR2 million SOA software, hardware and services contract with IBM to better serve Mutuelle d'Assurance as it transforms from a classic mutual insurance business to a banking and insurance company. For SOCRAM, this new contract demonstrates that SOA is the architecture of choice to enable a grand-scale strategic transformation.