United Friendly Insurance first heard of WITNESS at the 1993 BRP conference and just a few months later, in February the following year, it had WITNESS up and running, re-engineering major business processes within the company in response to new PIA regulations, compelling the insurance sector to streamline and restructure certain procedures.

United Friendly Insurance was due to overhaul three main areas of its business: resource allocation, recent business acquisition, and methods of payment in the cheque accounting department. Like any business planning a major change, they wanted to see the effects of potential scenarios before committing to a final decision. WITNESS provided the key: it can be applied to any operational facility, business process design or improvement proposal, measure the impact of change and try alternative solutions, by creating animated computer models based a number of selected conditions.

Allen Seldon explains: 'Whereas before you could do no more than work out a certain degree of leeway and allow for that, now you can project every single possible situation and look at how that affects the whole model'. This can all be carried out in a fraction of the time required for conventional methods -such as pilot studies- which, continues Seldon, 'Lets you identify exactly where the inefficiencies and the bottlenecks occur and do something about them, even as far as accurately predicting the degree to which incoming phone calls, or enquiries from other members of staff, can effect the output of work of a member department'.

The major business benefits for United Friendly Insurance Centre on the accuracy or resource allocation and reduce costs. 'When a company expands, for example, or when an increase in sales is expected and you will need to take on more staff, you would normally allow some margin of error and employ a safe amount of people,' says Seldon. 'That would mean that you might find yourself caught out having too many people, or too few, or in the wrong areas. WITNESS allows you to take the figures and all the other variables and visualise exactly the times and places you need people, and what you need them to do.' Consequently, after a recent business acquisition, United Friendly Insurance was able to re-allocate resources confidently and effectively.

A team approach to model building is very much encouraged: during the planning process, models of the operations can be built, analysed and changed collectively which means that not only will all options he explored through input from several departments, but the recommended actions will have a broader base of staff support in the long term. Also, as it has been developed for the people responsible for the performance of the business, and not for specialist programmers, proposals are displayed in a way everyone can understand -staff at United Friendly Insurance had just one- week training course when WITNESS was implemented.

The third area United Friendly Insurance wished to focus on was the cheque accounting department - they used their new model –builder to identify where the delays were occurring with cheque accounting and dealing with invoices. It turned out the delays were not actually caused in the accounts department at all, but with the different departmental managers, who were holding onto invoices and delaying processing them. By comparing different methods of payment, WITNESS provided a solution, reducing costs and ensuring that payments be made at optimum time.

Allen Seldon’s praise is high: 'It doesn't seem like two years since we implemented WITNESS. It's become an integral part of the day-to-day running of the place. I suppose its proof of how good it is and how much we rely on it that we don't even notice it's there anymore.'