W&W Informatik GmbH drives digital transformation with Control-M

W&W Informatik GmbH is the central service provider of the W&W Group, which was created as a merger of two long-standing companies: the building association Wüstenrot and the insurance company Württembergische.

By merging its two companies’ customer bases, W&W had an opportunity to develop new products and services and capture additional market share. The goal was to create unified, global, and detailed analysis of customer profiles and their contracts so they could cross-sell and develop targeted solutions to meet customers’ specific needs.

The first thing W&W Informatik GmbH did was create an internal Digital Acceleration Center (DAC). The DAC was responsible for the modernization, rationalization, and simplification of current business processes, as well as the creation of new processes necessary for achieving digital transformation. The DAC consolidated customer information from both company databases into a single database, which allowed customers to access multiple services offered by the company from one account.

For years, W&W Informatik GmbH used IBM Workload Automation (TWS) on its mainframe and distributed environments, but they faced numerous challenges:

• Slow online enrollment – During the enrollment process for new customers, W&W Informatik GmbH uses the POSTIDENT service, a digital identity check process offered by Deutsche Post. Creating a new account required polling the Deutsche Post database and that could only happen once per day, slowing down the enrollment process for customers.
• Lack of speed and agility in SDLC improvements – W&W Informatik GmbH wanted to accelerate its software development lifecycle (SDLC) to handle continuous implementation of new distributed, SAP^®, and Java applications, supporting new services and migrating IBM z/OS^® applications. IBM, W&W Informatik GmbH’s z/OS and distributed development teams implemented their applications through a manual, unstructured, and error-prone process. That system could not change services rapidly enough to meet demand.
• Unacceptable maintenance outages – W&W Informatik GmbH determined that the IBM workload automation solution it was using was no longer adequate to support their growth across the entire business. The biggest limitation was that the mainframe maintenance window was six-to-seven hours long. When the mainframe was stopped for maintenance, it halted work for 2,000 people. In addition, customers could not access the company’s systems for claims and new policy services.

After evaluating several vendors, W&W Informatik GmbH chose BMC’s Control-M workload automation solution. They selected Control-M because of its reputation as a market leader and because it was capable of improving the company’s application deployment speed. They converted existing workflows to Control-M by using its built-in workload conversion tool. Following their successful conversion, they experienced many benefits.

• Faster enrollment; higher satisfaction – The DAC team developed a new online enrollment process, eliminating the need for paper-based procedures. The company reduced the time needed to collect and review forms, determine eligibility, and communicate details to customers. With Control-M, W&W Informatik GmbH automated the polling of the Deutsche Post database, dramatically improving consumer experience and satisfaction.
• Agile development – Control-M Workload Change Manager is now being used by W&W Informatik GmbH’s developers and operations, standardizing processes between the two groups, and accelerating their development lifecycle by 80%. This has helped the DAC achieve one of its primary goals, releasing business applications faster and with higher quality.
• Risk mitigation – Control-M provides flexible management from a single point of control, across mainframe and distributed systems. This was a key driver for change. The business services underpinned by distributed workflows are still available during the mainframe maintenance window, increasing the availability of enrollment processes and critical business services by 3%.
• More modernization – W&W Informatik GmbH has decided to use Control-M to support a modernization project that will redesign all applications running in the Wüstenrot home-building IT environment. This will make Control-M the company’s central application orchestration platform.