Die Bayerische - Case Study - A clear overview of all contract information thanks to Neo4j

Challenge

“Personal and fast” is Die Bayerische’s brand promise to its customers. They aim to gain a competitive advantage through an increased focus on services and customers, giving them an edge over larger insurance companies. High-performance inventory database information that is nearly always available at all customer contact points is a prerequisite.

For insurance companies like Die Bayerische, this basic condition is not a trivial requirement to meet. They have a heavily heterogeneous system landscape for managing the insurance contracts. As certain types of insurance, such as pension insurance or disability insurance, can last for several decades, the different management systems have not been around for the same amount of time, operate with different formats and require a significant amount of downtime for batch runs. It is therefore a lot of effort to provide consistent information on customers and contracts in one interface.

Solution

“A graph database can perfectly represent the products of an insurance company. Contracts are linked to people and these people are linked to other people with other contracts. This leads to a compact data network that, with the help of the database, can be navigated or traversed,” says Thomas Wolf, Managing Director of iS2. “All related information can be retrieved from any starting point so very quickly.”

After a short evaluation, developers at iS2 quickly decided on Neo4j. The open source database especially impressed them with its fast learnability, great flexibility in the data model and its “whiteboard friendliness” which significantly facilitates internal discussions between project members.