Claims And Repairs Get FlexibleClaims And Repairs Get Flexible

The next time you get in a fender bender, chances are good Mitchell International Inc. will hear about it. North America's largest provider of collision-repair information supplies more than 16,000 body shops and insurance companies with repair cost and time estimates.

It's a technologically challenging job, one that requires sophisticated applications. Working with insurance companies demands flexible business and technical capabilities; they all have different business processes, driven by different systems, including legacy software.

So this summer, when Mitchell decided to start offering its claim and repair processes as a hosted service, it chose to build its new system on Java 2 Enterprise Edition technology, because it's extensible and scalable.

But the company wanted an architecture framework that was flexible enough to let its development team focus on business applications, not low-level infrastructure issues, says Zulfiquar Rashid, Mitchell's senior VP of development.

Mitchell turned to the Wakesoft Architecture Server, a software suite that gives developers a framework in which to build applications in an automated fashion. "It gives us more flexibility in configuring our back-end processes more easily for new customers," Rashid says. "It forces you to think in a process-oriented way."

The tool provides a separation of business functionality and the infrastructure layer, Wakesoft CEO Mike DeVries says. By providing a predefined structure for J2EE apps, businesses can increase their odds of success for application delivery, he says.

The Wakesoft technology has helped Mitchell cut down on the time that it would take to develop and deploy applications, Rashid says. "We're able to develop applications faster, that are more easily maintainable, and that you can modify."