Brief

Our client required change to the high-volume claims adjudication system to cater for the new ACA subsidy rules introduced by the US Government. The claims adjudication system had been designed and developed by 8 West in the past and is heavily tailored for the customer's business processes.

This project required a substantial redesign of the 8 West designed processing engine within the claims adjudication system. The engine runs in a Gigaspace In-Memory Compute Platform which couples extreme transaction processing with real-time analytics. We use the Java based Gigaspace platform as a high performance In-Memory Data Grid that co-locates data and business logic for ultra-low latency and high availability. The adjudication engine residing in Gigaspaces was designed to parallel process high volumes claims in real-time. This was a highly technical and complex problem and our in depth technical knowledge and architectural approach was critical to its successful resolution.

Having identified a number of technical uncertainties in the project, the 8 West development team engaged in a systematic process to identify the most performant and reliable technical solution to the ACA subsidy requirement. Several design iterations were undertaken before settling on the final design solution that best addressed the client requirements and the technological concerns. The solution we implemented introduced parallel workflows through the processing engine to support the dual adjudication of claims, thus addressing the ACA subsidy requirement. This was a highly technical and complex problem and our in depth technical knowledge and architectural approach was critical to its successful resolution.

Our delivery on this project highlights our strong technical design and development skills and our continued close cooperation with the client's business and technical community. Operating as one team, our development team and that of the customers partnered to deliver substantial changes to the organisations mission critical system within a tight timeframe.

The 8 West team is used to working on mission critical systems and fully understands the performance, reliability and security requirements of Fortune 50 companies. Delivering complex systems is far more than just assembling skilled developers. It requires strong management and governance as well as sophisticated Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery (CD), Continuous Code Quality (CCQ) and security assessment techniques.

Outcome

Our work on this project is an example where our team, working closely with our customer, delivered a system that met the ACA mandate without adding significant technical debt or performance overhead to the organisations core claims adjudication system. We have had a long history of project success for this client. Our strong team of technology professionals, combined with excellent project governance and management, have allowed us to partner closely with our client's business and technology teams to deliver success.

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Brief

A major US healthcare insurer required a mission critical upgrade to its payment systems, which process several billion dollars of business a year. The insurer was experiencing large year on year membership growth, with future growth at even higher levels expected due to a novel new business model. The legacy payment system had become unfit for purpose and required an unsustainable maintenance overhead from application support and development.

After assessing commercial tools, the insurer commissioned 8 West to implement a modern solution that will scale to meet future business needs.

Solution

The business required stability and reliability, but also needed to shorten the time to market for new business features to gain a competitive advantage. No off the shelf product could meet the requirements while delivering the required flexibility.

The existing system required several months to push new features to production due to the massive testing effort. Even then, new features often caused instability or bugs in production due to their very complex nature and manual testing process. To resolve this two fully automated testing processes were developed. The first was for migration from the legacy setup to the new system. Here we ran the legacy and new systems in parallel for several months to make sure no dollar was unaccounted. Secondly, we developed a new suite of tests covering every business and technical feature that can be run for any change. The new system is configurable to enable performance tuning and optimisation over the lifetime of the project.

The new system is configurable to enable performance tuning and optimisation over the lifetime of the project. The design and development, from inception to final implementation, always considered the need to scale to meet all future requirements. The design was heavily based on configuration, via an intuitive user interface, to allow the business manage payments in a flexible way.

The new system operates on an event driven architecture, pre-processing detailed and complex permutations of data for payment calculations. The system delivers a suite of services and data distribution interfaces that are seamlessly integrated with existing sub-systems and third party vendor products.

Outcome

The bespoke implementation designed and developed by 8 West resulted in a significant improvement in our clients' ability to meet the evolving needs of their customers.

1. Maintenance costs for the new system are significantly lower due to:
   • The increased stability of the system.
   • The ability to monitor to monitor, pause, continue or restart the process.
   • The ability to throttle the process and easily scale up as required.
   • The ability to release daily to production as testing fully automated.
2. Enhancements are easily made without risking existing functionality due to the 100% test coverage. The fully automated test suite verify every business function is working in less than 1 hour, compared to weeks or months of testing previously.
3. Payment now runs 24 hours a day giving the business the information as needed. The ability to preview and modify data is a massive improvement over the old nightly batch system.

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Brief

A major US healthcare insurer required a mission critical upgrade to its legacy financial systems. These systems were past end of life, considered to be no longer maintainable and relied heavily on manual paper based processes.

8 West was commissioned to implement a modern solution that will scale to meet future business needs.

Solution

Our client required a state of the art billing solution to service its existing client base and to win new business in this competitive market. Despite previously investing substantial time and effort with off the shelf solution providers, no viable solution could be found.

They needed the ability to execute ad-hoc billing runs throughout core business hours in response to client requests and provisioning final periodic billing runs on a daily basis. These strategic features would have to function without impacting existing mission critical systems, such as Claims and Enrolment processing, and without the need for any new infrastructural investment by our client.

Given the magnitude of existing data within the system, and the burgeoning data volumes arising out of the need to maintain invoice and billing related information for an extended period, one of the biggest challenges was to mitigate the impact of such data volumes on the client's operational capabilities. Our goal was to reposition the system to support the operator, improving their system awareness and highlighting events of concern in real time.

At its core the new system operated on an event driven architecture, pre-processing detailed and complex permutations of data to be used for invoice calculations. The system delivered a suite of services and data distribution interfaces which integrated seamlessly with existing sub systems and new third party vendor products.

Beyond the system architecture there was a fundamental paradigm shift in the relationship between operators and the system. The legacy system relied solely on the operators understanding of their actions to maintain operational stability. Our goal was to reposition the system to support the operator, improving their system awareness and highlighting events of concern in real time. Operators now feel empowered to make decisions knowing that they are always fully informed.

Outcome

The bespoke implementation designed and developed by 8 West resulted in a significant improvement in our clients' ability to meet the evolving needs of their customers.

Previously billing runs were scheduled to run overnight monthly, with operators waiting until the next day to review the results and customers waiting even longer to receive their bills.

Now the new resource sensitive, reliable, fault tolerant and concurrently executing engines allow for:

• Ad-hoc invoice generation during core operating hours
• Pre-computation of billing invoice contributions
• Near real time adjustment of these contributions in response to system state changes.

8 West made an appreciable improvement in limiting scope for erroneous data exposure through a combination of new processes and an innovative data architecture.

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Brief

8 West has provided end-to-end, multi-channel ECommerce solutions for world class online retailers including Avon, Ralph Lauren, Bath & Body Works, KidKraft and others. We have delivered both B2B and B2C solutions from full end to end ecommerce platforms with content management, billing and payment, back end integration to localised mobile micro-sites. All our engagements are characterised by a common need to deliver rock solid engineering with an elegant and functional user experience that maximises the client's brand values by excellent design.

Solution

8 West solutions have delivered rewarding customer relationships, facilitated operational efficiencies in a multi-channel environment, increased revenue through focus on conversion and significantly enhanced customer service delivery.

Our strategic assessments interpret the organisation's business processes to assess the corresponding technological requirements, and then maps these into a comprehensive project execution plan. 8 West's solutions are supported by a robust technical architecture and are developed in accordance with leading project methodologies and techniques. We not only provide the full suite of eCommerce applications - we guarantee that they will be flexible, highly integrated solutions and are extensible for future growth. Without being tied to any specific solution provider, we are free to select the best technology, platform and process to suit our clients, whether that is an off-the-shelf product or bespoke development, designed by our team of architects. We are about designing strategies, solutions and technologies that support beautiful work.

Above all, 8 West is about great design - not only from an aesthetic perspective, but also - and more importantly - we are about designing strategies, solutions and technologies that support beautiful work. Our work has helped boost the bottom line for clients across many industries from health care to fashion retailing to search and rescue and beyond.

8 West responsibilities for customers have covered all areas including, Creative Review, Image Optimization, UI Development, CMS Submission and Integration, Testing, Performance Review, Strategic Direction, Project Management, Architecture, Development, Security Testing, Support and Infrastructure Management. We have worked with 3 party tooling such as Umbraco, Drupal, Magento, Sitecore and third part hosting infrastructure partnerships with eBay, Rackspace, and others.

Outcome

Our experience in scaling and securing enterprise solutions delivers the engineering excellence and rigour that support our creative customer facing solutions, giving customers the best of both worlds, elegant ECommerce solutions underpinned by mission critical engineering.

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Brief

Designed in close co-operation with Coast Guard and Sea Rescue organisations, SafeTrx is a proven maritime safety platform that helps reduce the risk of maritime accidents and the loss of human lives at sea. It is the world's leading maritime search and rescue application with over 750,000 recorded hours of use around the world. SafeTrx is the standard marine mobile safety platform in nine countries - Ireland, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Finland, Norway, Australia and South Africa.

Solution

The SafeTrx App monitors boat journeys and alerts Emergency Contacts ashore should the craft fail to return on time. Its principal benefit is automating and digitising craft arrival and departures, crew lists and automated alerts whilst building up a significant database of small craft and craft behaviour by type, period and activity. It also presents an opportunity to change the dynamic interaction between the emergency services and its highest risk customers and change their behaviour over time. SafeTrx users have the ability to quickly activate a 112 call directly from the SafeTrx app. On activation, it automatically sends the users location to the SafeTrx Monitoring Console. The Coast Guard can instantly view the position of the emergency call and can access vessel name, user name, gender, phone number, vessel name, craft type, radio equipment, last reported position, people on board, activity and trip ID. The app displays the location, speed and heading on the emergency call screen. SafeTrx is the world's leading maritime search and rescue application with over 750,000 recorded hours of use around the world.

Outcome

The SafeTrx app is being used actively across the world and has been used in Emergency situations in Dutch, Norwegian and South African waters. It is very popular with the boating community and amongst search and rescue first responders, who appreciate its utility as a valuable aid in location vessels in distress.

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Brief

Amidst the noise and chatter of today's online world, where traditional marketing has become interleaved with and transformed by social media and millennials' changing behaviour patterns, the concept of brand elevation has become critical. The challenge to company brands is they must be credible, impactful, and create engaging and powerful narratives and experiences. How do companies ensure their online presence resonates and motivates people to share (and like, tweet, pin, and otherwise engage) to disseminate the brand message through all available channels, maximising exposure to potential customers for increased sales?

Solution

8 West's Creative and User Experience teams excel at partnering with clients to help them achieve brand elevation. We know how on-line engagement works. We know how to take a brand, product or service and make it immersive, make it interactive, and make it matter - to transform it into an experience. We know how to take a brand, product or service and make it immersive, make it interactive, and make it matter - to transform it into an experience.

8 West has helped some of the world's biggest brands to create this impact. Our creative process takes a client's advertising brief and works it up into an experience, so it becomes animated, interactive, engaging and impactful.

Estee Lauder approached 8 West to produce microsites for marketing campaigns around their flagship products. Our Creative and User Experience teams created Boutiques with complex and bespoke user experiences, pixel-perfect design and typography unique to each product or campaign. These microsites have become integral to the Estee Lauder marketing life-cycle and are tightly integrated with other marketing channels. For example, in 2015 Modern Muse Le Rouge had an integrated product launch, with a high-profile TV campaign featuring Kendall Jenner and an 8 West-produced Boutique including multiple Kendall Jenner videos, supported by viral social media marketing. The campaigns were highly successful and acclaimed.

Outcome

A brand succeeds or fails in its emotional connection with people. 8 West's partnership with customers such as Estee Lauder, Mac Cosmetics and Smashbox showcases our expertise in pushing the envelope of what impactful and beautiful design can achieve, to elevate a brand experience that engages and motivates users to become consumers and online brand ambassadors.

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