Generali Versicherungen

Client

Generali Deutschland is the second-largest direct insurance company in the German market and part of the international Generali Group, which also includes Aachen Münchener, CosmosDirekt, Central Krankenversicherung and Advocard Rechtschutzversicherung. As such, the Group covers virtually all consumer and corporate segments. Dialog Versicherung, an insurance company serving insurance brokers, joined the Group in October 2019.

Initial situation

The formation of Dialog Versicherung AG gave Generali Group a completely new status as regards insurance brokerage business. The new company launched on the German market with a portfolio comprising life insurance, company pensions and consumer insurance products. Timed to coincide with the formation of the new company, a separate website dedicated entirely to the insurance broker segment was needed, able to offer the company’s 19,000 resellers the chance to access information quickly and download key documents.

To avoid disrupting overall project planning, there was a fixed deadline for the completion of this new website: the platform needed to be online and fully completely functional within just a few months.

A flexible and innovative new platform

To set up the platform, Monday Consulting was commissioned to provide support staff and consultants to advise the team. One key challenge in this project was the lack of an overall concept or draft design at the point in time when the new platform was given the green light. Accordingly, the architecture and infrastructure had to be set up to ensure that the results from the design agency—who were working in parallel—could be deployed as flexibly as possible.

In light of the tight schedule, the first step was to follow Monday Consulting’s recommendation of drafting a minimum viable product (MVP) that defined key functions and content, while sketching out a project methodology. Since the sister platform, which was to be used as the underlying model, had a very different focus as well as an entirely separate structure, Monday Consulting decided to develop a completely new site based on CoreMedia 9.

Early results achieved by continuous deployment

Thanks to the innovative approach of completing the development environment, infrastructure and continuous integration first, production-quality results were available very early on in the course of the project. The continuous deployment approach adopted also cut the time and costs necessary for implementing project results, which ultimately resulted in a significantly shorter time-to-market.

Both of these strategies were put into practice with Red Hat’s OpenShift container solution. This environment enables failure-tolerant and scalable operation of the CoreMedia system. Additional components can therefore be brought in as required and deployments can be carried out to ensure that customers do not experience any downtime. The resulting flexibility means that Generali can now respond rapidly to changing requirements.

The collaborative software ‘Zeplin’ was also used to integrate continual dialog with the design agency throughout the development process. A pattern library was used to define design elements and other recurring objects in order to ensure uniform presentation for the platform.