Over the past years, German motor insurers have been facing growing competition from in- and outside the industry (e.g., car manufacturers, automobile clubs). Together with a growing pricing pressure on insurance premiums, their combined ratio increased from 94.5% in 2004 to 101.6% in 2008. This indicates that cost savings and process improvements in claims management have a great impact on the KPIs of insurers. While insurance companies are under pressure to decrease costs, customers lack adequate assistance when it comes to an insurance claim. Against this background, we present an analysis of today's claims management process in motor insurance and describe four technology-based process improvements. In order to realize the process improvements, a service-oriented architecture is presented and the implementation of a demonstrator illustrates our solution. Finally, we propose business value metrics to measure the effects linked with each process improvement.

Smartphones spielen eine entscheidende Rolle bei der Emotionalisierung des «Produkts» Versicherung. Anwendungen fur Smartphones sind drauf und dran, die Kundenbeziehungen in der Versicherungsbranche zu revolutionieren. Blosse Unterstutzung im Schadenfall genugt langst nicht mehr.

The factory of the future will be heavily based on internet and web technologies. A new generation of devices with embedded hardware and software will feature greatly improved storage, computing, and networking capabilities. This will lead to a system landscape of millions of networked devices that is heterogeneous with respect to functionality but features standard interfaces. This new breed of devices will not only be able to store and report information about themselves and their physical surroundings, but execute more computations and local logic. They will form collaborative peer-to-peer networks and also connect to central systems. By eliminating media breaks, e.g. by replacing manual data entry with a direct connection to devices, this "internet of things" will feature end-to-end connectivity, making the models of the real world, as they exist in business systems, follow reality more precisely and with shorter delay. This will change the way we design, deploy and use services at all layers of the system, be it the device, line, plant, or company level or even between collaborating organizations. This chapter describes an architecture for effective integration of the services from the internet of things with enterprise services. We describe the case of centrally managing a population of devices that are located at different sites, including dynamic discovery of devices and the services they offer, near real-time cross-site interaction, interaction with business processes and distributed system management.

Both, the logistics and insurance companies rely on software intensive systems and IT-infrastructure to run their core business operational. In recent years IT-improvements have resulted e.g. in better tracking and tracing capabilities for the whole logistics industry. Designing an interface in this case between the logistics and insurance value chain further enhances visibility and transparency on transportation. Though, the design of a large collaborative service infrastructure is a complex task. In this paper, we investigate whether design science supports this. The research follows design science guidelines creating a message hub based on sensor telematics technologies, which physically links the two value chains. The described IT-artefact enables logistics and insurance companies to improve their respective products and solutions with e.g. integrated risk management or active process control. This demonstrates how design science projects eventually facilitate real business innovation within networked enterprises.

Due to consequent policy making and research funding in Europe, the US, and Japan, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) are gaining momentum and provide mature concepts for vehicular communications enabling vehicles to communicate amongst themselves (Vehicle-to-Vehicle, V2V) and their immediate vicinity (Vehicle-to-Infrastructure, V2I). Based on the proliferation of powerful Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) technologies such as UMTS, WiMAX, or LTE, the aforementioned communication concepts are complemented by the integration of vehicles with business applications (Vehicle-to-Business, V2B). While applications that require the integration of vehicles and business systems are emerging, there is still a lack of well-defined and standardized integration platforms that allow for a reliable and scalable interconnection between vehicles and business systems. Against this background, this paper provides an analysis of the challenges and requirements for V2B communication as well as a dedicated integration platform to connect vehicles with business systems. To illustrate our approach, we present the application scenario of claims assistance after car accidents

It is expected that future shop-floors will be populated by thousands of networked embedded devices. Those will not only communicate using IP (as in TCP/IP), but also feature some autonomy, allowing them to collaborate among themselves and with enterprise systems. As they can offer both their mechatronic and higher-level functions as a service and support dynamic deployment of new code, they can execute business logic locally, allowing for new classes of business processes that are executed collaboratively by back-end and embedded systems. While some parts of a process will still be executed in the data centre, the rest will execute directly on embedded devices on the shop-floor. Business Process execution will therefore be more dynamic and context-based.We introduce an approach to manage efficient business process execution over such highly dynamic infrastructures.

As the system design of in-car embedded systems becomes more and more modular and motor vehicles get increasingly connected to enterprise systems based on Car-2-X technology, the integration of additional embedded software features becomes technically feasible throughout the product lifecycle. For car manufacturers, this opens up the opportunity to sell additional embedded software features to their customers at a later time, thus generating subsequent revenue in addition to the initial sale. However, due to the competitive environment and customer preferences, it is impossible to apply this concept to the complete feature set. In order to support the decision, which features should be included in a shipped product and which features should be retained to generate subsequent revenue, we propose a profit-maximizing method that identifies two complementary feature bundles. To illustrate our approach, we present a numerical example, which illustrates the partitioning of embedded software features in motor vehicles.

When it comes to vehicle accidents, people are stressed out and overstrained, even if it is just a car body damage and no one is hurt. They often lack adequate and immediate assistance and may worry about the lengthy and paper-based loss report to their insurance carrier. At the same time, it is crucial for insurance companies to receive early and detailed case circumstances in order to decrease costs and assist customers with value-added services. Against this background, we propose the usage of mobile phones in order to assist people in the aftermath of an accident. We present a concept for mobile claims assistance along with a proto-typical implementation that features an asynchronous communication between mobile phones and claims management enterprise systems based on mobile Web Services. Finally, we discuss the user perspective on mobile insurance applications and present data we collected using a combination of focus groups and user surveys.

It is expected that millions of embedded devices and machines empowered with Internet technologies will be able to communicate, collaborate and offer their functionality as a service. At the shop floor, this creates new opportunities for more dynamic environments where timely usage of the monitoring information is coupled with control and in full collaboration with enterprise systems. We focus on demonstrating our efforts towards such cross-layer composition for the future service-enabled factory.

Advances in the areas of embedded systems, computing, and networking are leading to an infrastructure composed of millions of heterogeneous devices. These devices will not simply convey information but process it in transit, connect peer to peer, and form advanced collaborations. This ``Internet of Things'' infrastructure will be strongly integrated with the environment, and its integration with the enterprise systems will not only further blur the line between business IT systems and the real world, but will change the way we design, deploy, and use services. New opportunities can emerge for businesses, which can now closely collaborate with the real world. The work presented here proposes an architecture for an effective integration of the Internet of Things in enterprise services.

In the era of ubiquitous devices and mobility, we increasingly carry objects of great value (in terms of data, money or emotions). Because of our increased mobility, we are also more inclined to lose these objects. When it comes to finding them again, current lost property offices seem rather inflexible and not fully adapted to our nomad lives. They lack dynamic information, introduce too many intermediates and induce high costs. We support the growth of a community of users able to solve the problem on their own using their mobile phones. We describe our concept and implementation of the idea based on prototypes of mobile phones enhanced with a novel type of RFID (Radio Frequency IDentifiaction) reader, the use of the EPC (Electronic Product Code) standards and the creation of both mobile and server-side software. We finally discuss how it can help making the current system more dynamic and efficient.

Today manufacturers require efficient reaction to critical events occurring at the shop floor. Therefore, device-level data needs to be integrated into business processes in a standardized and flexible way to avoid time-consuming media breaks. Current approaches are characterized by a late indication of changes in the production environment and a delayed implementation of changed production plans. As a solution, we propose a web service-based integration of enterprise systems with shop-floor activities, using SOA-ready networked embedded devices. We examine the requirements for the integration and derive an appropriate architecture that tries to close the integration gap. The timely provision of data, the impact of device-level information on business processes, as well as the direct bidirectional communication with device-level services promotes the vision of adaptive manufacturing and leads to reduced production costs.

After car accidents, people are stressed out and overstrained, even if no one is hurt. They also lack adequate and immediate support, for example to get their car fixed or to organize a rental car. In addition, they may have doubts regarding their insurance coverage and worry about the lengthy and paper-based loss report. On the other hand, it is crucial for insurance companies to get detailed case circumstances as early in the claims management process as possible, in order to decrease costs and processing time. Against this background, we propose the direct integration of mobile phones with claims management enterprise systems. Our demonstrator shows how an Android-based mobile phone is used to directly create an insurance claim in the SAP Claims Management solution. In addition, we demonstrate subsequent value-added services on the mobile phone, like directions to the next authorized repair shop or the arrangement of a rental car, and show how an insurance representative evaluates the submitted information in the enterprise system.

Recent advances in the areas of wireless communication and sensors led to a decline in prices for smart technologies while devices became more powerful and reliable. Yet, the deployment as well as the functional range of sensor and wireless communication technology in residential buildings is still limited. In a possible application scenario for these technologies, home safety devices like smoke detectors, motion detectors, and burglary alarm systems are equipped with wireless communication modules, thus making them a part of the Internet of Things. This means that safety devices (the "Things") in the physical world can communicate amongst each other and get integrated with the digital world of the Internet. The paper at hand discusses the role of smart prevention technologies within this emerging domain using the example of smoke detectors. The research gives an overview of costs, barriers for wide-spread use, and success factors of "smart smoke detectors" and proposes an infrastructur e for smart prevention technology. Due to their natural interest in loss prevention, the paper also focuses on the relevance of smart prevention technology for insurance companies. The research examines the role of smart prevention technology within the Internet of Things from various angles and therefore represents an overview of this emerging topic that prepares the ground for future research.