Case Study
Achmea future-proofs operations with Pega
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70+ Pega applications across five business divisions
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Supporting eight brands and 10 million customers
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50% reduction in time to complete a policy origination journey
“By 2018, Pega was really a buzzword within the company. Everyone – or at least it seemed like that – wanted to be part of the Pega journey within the company. Everything had to be solved by Pega and all architects came to us saying, ‘Hey, we need to be part of this journey and the success.”
The Business Issue
Founded over 200 years ago in the Netherlands, Achmea now serves more than 10 million customers worldwide. Despite its rich history and customer-first ethos, legacy systems and outdated technology hindered the company’s ability to adapt to changing business demands.
In 2014, Achmea implemented the Pega Platform™ to power its operations. But over time, this original version failed to meet the evolving needs of its diverse customer base and resulted in compounding technical debt. The existing infrastructure struggled to support the growing number of applications, leading to sluggish performance and delayed responses.
Furthermore, decentralized divisions within Achmea had created a siloed approach to the technology, impeding collaboration and creating inefficiencies. Different divisions operated in isolation, leading to fragmented development efforts and hindering the reuse of components across the organization. This made the company's delivery to production slow and cumbersome, involving manual testing, migration, and decision-making processes.
The Solution
To future-proof its operations, Achmea began a comprehensive modernization journey, partnering with Pega and HCLTech for their expertise and to expand resources.
The solution consisted of several key steps:
- Strategic alignment: A steering committee was formed across divisions to set common business objectives and ensure alignment.
- Infrastructure overhaul: Achmea embraced cloud adoption to ensure scalability, reliability, and flexibility.
- DevOps adoption: The company shifted toward a DevOps culture, enabling faster development, testing, and deployment cycles.
- Modernization execution: The existing applications were analyzed, and a systematic process was implemented to upgrade, remove technical debt, and implement the latest security and integration patterns.
- Continuous evolution: Governance processes and lifecycles were established to ensure ongoing relevance and adaptation to changing trends and technology.
The Results
- 70+ Pega applications across five business divisions, supporting eight brands and 10 million customers
- All running on the latest version of Pega, leading to improved application response times and ensuring a seamless experience for both internal teams and customers
- Cloud adoption driving relevancy and agility
- 15+ hosting segments and infrastructure templates reducing lead times and accelerating development and deployment cycles
- 50% reduction in time to complete a policy origination journey
- 20+ reusable applications leading to increased development efficiency and consistency across divisions
- Autonomous innovation is allowing the company to rapidly adapt to evolving market trends and customer needs