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COMPANY FILE
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Carole Nash Insurance Consultants
Ltd is the UK and Ireland’s biggest motorcycle insurance
specialist, and one of the UK’s top 30 insurance brokers,
with a portfolio of insurance products covering modern,
classic and vintage motorcycles, classic cars, travel
and mainstream motors.
Company founder Carole Nash started
the business in 1985 with a £2,500 redundancy cheque,
working from her diningroom table.
Her company, which celebrated its
20th anniversary last November, has now captured around
30% of the UK motorcycle insurance market. It employs
nearly 400 staff and generates an annual income of over
£70 million.
Carole Nash is headquartered in Altrincham,
with offices in Dublin which were opened in 1999 by
bike-loving pop star Ronan Keating.
Since 1996 the company’s policyholder
base has grown from 30,000 to over 250,000. In 2005,
Carole Nash herself was shortlisted for the Veuve Clicquot
Award, the UK’s top businesswomen’s title, and was named
by Management Today as one of the UK’s top 100
entrepreneurs, appearing at 56 in the magazine’s league
table.
With the company changing and expanding,
Carole Nash’s IT department led by Les Boggia can run
up to 90 projects simultaneously, often linked to business
process improvement. The department has adopted Asta
Teamplan project management software to help in this,
used by 25 IT managers and staff. The company is considering
extending its use of Teamplan to the wider business.
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Q: WHAT BENEFITS HAVE YOU GOT FROM TEAMPLAN?
A: The biggest benefit is its ability to give a quick snapshot
of exactly what IT is doing to the board.
The second is the scenarios – dropping in another project
and seeing the impact. It enables me to sit down with the
chief officers and look at the impact of moving projects around.
The company is 20 years old and some of our business processes
are that old too. We are changing; we launched car insurance
products last year but a lot of planning goes under the cloak.
Now we have got Asta and a new project comes along, we can
say “Yes we can do that (the answer is always yes) but here’s
the impact”. Then we can have the debate of contract versus
permanent staff – do we get external people in or do we do
it ourselves and shuffle some other projects back?
The third main benefit is the KPI reporting – we can look
at the initial estimate of effort and timescale and at what
it actually was.
Generally, there has been a marked difference in the understanding
of IT within the business. They are more thoughtful when they
request something.
I joined the company twoand- a-half years ago and the view
then was IT was a “bloody expensive overhead, why not outsource
it?” This software has helped to turn that opinion around.
It’s not about IT getting more resources – its biggest use
has been to evidence what IT is doing.
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Conspectus 2006
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Copyright © 2006
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