Company Overview
Apart from being one of the country's most recognizable brands, MTN is a South African cellular network operator and is listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange under the umbrella of the MTN Group.  Launched in 1994, MTN now has close on five million subscribers.  MTN's GSM network is one of the largest in the world.  It has approximately 4000 sites covering 19200km of road, 900000km² of land and providing access to 94,5% of South Africa's population.  MTN South Africa owns MTN Service Provider and has interests in iTalk Cellular, Leaf Wireless and New Bucks Holdings.

MTN South Africa remains committed to providing cost-effective, mobile communication solutions and services that are simple, reliable and innovative to its subscriber base.  This has been delivered by a strong brand presence and essence, which underpinned by excellent network coverage and supported by convenient distribution.

Business Requirement
MTN offers a value added service to its wide customer base in the form of Cell Phone Handset and SIM Card insurance.  Along with one of South Africa's leading Insurance operations, Guardrisk, MTN provides an range of insurance options to its subscribers that cover all types of loss or damage to the cell phone handset.  The large subscriber base and the natural loss ratios mean that a number of claims are made against the insurance policies on a daily basis.

MTN Insurance was dealing with approximately eight hundred claims per month and handling over ten thousand claim related phone calls a month.  Each claim called for a file to be opened, all documents and supporting information was inserted and the file was then classified pending finalization.  Once the query is finalized the file is archived one year later.  This process was extremely time consuming and lead to unnecessary resource requirements.  The time taken to process a claim was averaging in excess of two days and this proved very inconvenient to the subscribers who were not communicated with during this period.

Business Solution
SMC Software offered MTN a solution that relieves the burden of Claims Administration and Policy Management and transforms it into a digital and paperless format which allows the organization to concentrate on Customer Relations.  The Ion 3000® insurance system is an end-to-end insurance process providing a digital document work flow process from start to finish.  The Ion 3000® system also provides technical underwriting functions that calculate monthly premiums and measures the risk of each new policy.

The solution includes the use of Microsoft Windows 2000, Visual Studio 6 (COM and DCOM), SQL Server 2000, Microsoft Exchange and a fully integrated accounting package at Office level using Microsoft Excel.  Ion 3000® integrates the Microsoft Office platform into the operation for ease of user training and quick productivity gains.  The reporting tools are all linked from SQL Server 2000 and OLAP tools to the Microsoft Excel format which is used extensively to build reports.  Users are empowered to extract the information from the system themselves without requiring the MTN IT department to produce the reports on their behalf.

Business Benefits
The introduction of the Ion 3000® system allowed the insurance staff to deliver a better service to their client base.  It reduced the call rate to just on two thousand calls a month.  Staff members were retrained and reassigned with the overall staff complement reduced by 50% of the previous requirement.  The claim turn-around time had been reduced to 24 hours.  The improvement in customer service levels and subscriber satisfaction achieved as a result of this solution has been phenomenal.

 

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