Skandia becomes one of the first customers running J.D. Edwards OneWorld on the IBM RS/6000

Skandia's Challenge: Merging Business Interests Worldwide
Established in 1855, Skandia Group is a successful personal finance company, offering international savings and life insurance services. With managed assets of $96 billion U.S. (SEK 833 billion) and annual sales of $16 billion U.S. (SEK 134 billion), Skandia has experienced an 82 percent year-to-year growth from 1998 to 1999. Today, Skandia is active in 25 countries around the world.

Skandia Group's Nordic operations are now expanding with the establishment of another company, Ackuratess Administration Ltd., which will run on J.D. Edwards OneWorld enterprise software. Ackuratess Administration will offer financial services, including accounting, cash management and procurement services.

Skandia Selects J.D. Edwards and IBM

Christer Dannas joined Skandia in September 1997 and led the OneWorld implementation team. Accoring to Dannas, Skandia moved from its legacy application to OneWorld as a cost-saving tactic to avoid further enterprise software development and in-house maintenance costs.

"We selected OneWorld for several reasons. First, we wanted to select a common general ledger within the Skandia Group that has the ability to deploy globally. OneWorld immediately came to the top of the short list with its solid and flexible functional standards and its modern architecture," Dannas said.

Rolling out implementation to 20 sites will make OneWorld the common application throughout Skandia's dispersed financial departments.

Skandia considered several other enterprise software offerings before finally selecting OneWorld.

"We looked at three other applications," said Orjan Martensson of Skandia's IT department. "With OneWorld, we could set up our general ledger on whatever platform we liked. UNIX®, NT®, or AS/400®. So OneWorld was an easy choice from a technical point of view. J.D. Edwards WorldSoftware was already running in other parts of the Skandia Group. The staff using it told us they wanted to stay with J.D. Edwards because of its superior ability to interface with other OEM applications and excellent functionality. These were the main reasons we selected OneWorld."

Skandia: One of the First Companies to Run OneWorld on the RS/6000

Although Skandia has a strong history with IBM, it did consider other hardware platform providers.

"We did the standard tests on other UNIX platforms, but we ultimately selected IBM's RS/6000," Dannas said.

Skandia's personal experience with the RS/6000 factored into the decision.

"It is our experience that RS/6000 offers more stability. We also chose the RS/6000 environment because it is easy to run, requiring very little administration," Martensson said.

Skandia was one of the first companies to run OneWorld on the RS/6000.

"We have other RS/6000 systems within the Skandia Group, and we haven't been disappointed. We went live in May 1999 with 220 concurrent users without any significant concerns," says Martensson.

"I have been working with general ledger systems for 25 years and I have never encountered so few problems after going live," Dannas said. "We credit this to the reliability of the RS/6000 and to OneWorld's solid design."

Skandia's Careful Configuration Planning Produces System Confidence

"Skandia began its OneWorld training in October 1997 and our users attended a OneWorld implementation workshop in December," Dannas said. "We identified the team members needed for the implementation by January 1998 and had our clients up and running in a Windows NT environment. In April, we started up our Norwegian company, taking time to test everything thoroughly and to learn as much as we could before proceeding to other companies. Norway actually went live in November 1998. Then the implementation went even quicker. We brought up Denmark in January 1999 and Sweden in April 1999. Now, we have one UNIX environment for our life insurance companies and one UNIX environment for our non-life insurance companies, supporting our business processes completely."

"We are running OneWorld's general ledger and are now implementing accounts payable. We also plan to install procurement," Dannas said. "We have made a big investment in OneWorld and our infrastructure, and now we will have the convenience of easily implementing the other OneWorld applications."

Martensson said Skandia is focusing on e-business applications in the future.

"We are looking at integrating Windows-based purchasing of supplies, and integrating vendor systems with ours via OneWorld. As for commerce, insurance and banking, our goal is to be the key financial web portal," Martensson said. "We are very impressed with the flexibility of OneWorld," he said. "For instance, during the general ledger implementation we had two reorganizations before going live. Since then, we have split out one company and taken in another, all without a major impact on our implementation."

Skandia's information services staff is, and can remain, relatively small despite the company's expansion.

"We have few people for application, database and maintenance support," Martensson said. "With the soundness of our J.D. Edwards OneWorld and IBM RS/6000 solution, there's not much for our technical support people to do."

HARDWARE NOTES: Skandia. s enterprise server is RS/6000/S7A (SP/Raven) (OneWorld 7.3.2.1, SP9; AIX 4.3.2; Oracle 8.0.5). The deployment server is Compaq 6500 (OneWorld 7.3.2.1, SP9; MS NT 4.0, SP5). The clients run OneWorld 7.3.2.1, SP9; Oracle 8.0.5 client; MS Windows NT 4.0 WS; MS Office 97; and MS IE 4.01. Desktops are fixed line IBM and other vendor PCs that are connected via fixed lines (with no dial-up).