We’re excited to announce the release of our OnDemand Control Hub, a web-based portal built to enhance the SaaS core systems experience of carrier IT Operations teams by bringing more control and visibility to your Duck Creek SaaS applications! Last year, during our webinar on vFormation, we provided a preview of Control Hub, and today, we’re thrilled to say that it is now available for all of our Duck Creek OnDemand customers licensing Duck Creek Policy, Billing, Rating, Claims, Insights, and Producer to utilize. So what are some of the key capabilities in the initial release?
Enhancing Test Environment Access
As the name “Control Hub” is meant to imply, we recognize that the ability for a carrier to have more control of their applications can be quite helpful. First off, we’re empowering IT teams to easily handle administrative tasks such as managing role-based access control (i.e. assigning which users have permissions to access a carrier’s test environments). In the past, this task would have entailed a carrier filling out a support ticket and having our SaaS Operations team handling the request that same day. Now, a carrier simply enters the user’s name and email address, clicks the submit button in Control Hub, and an automated email is triggered sending out instructions for the new user to set their password and log in to the environment.
Applying Data Fixes on Your Schedule
Despite everyone’s best intentions, we all know that sometimes production data can get corrupted and need to be corrected. In certain situations, those corrections might not be able to be made directly in our Policy, Billing, Claims, etc. user interfaces. With Control Hub’s Data Fix feature, carrier IT teams can easily specify permissions of data fix requestors and approvers, upload files of the corrected data, and then apply these corrected data fixes directly to a database in just a few clicks. We’ve also made it convenient for your IT operations team to schedule data fix maintenance windows, so that a change could, for example, be restricted to only being applied to production from 9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. on Monday-Friday and 9:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m. on weekends. If a data fix is approved during the specified maintenance window, then it gets deployed; if not, then it is held up and queued to deploy in the designated timeframe.
System Availability and Usage Trends Reporting Dashboards
Another aspect of Control Hub involves providing more visibility and transparency into our customers’ core systems. What this means is that we’ll be providing application availability status across all environment domains. Whether it be a test, performance, production, or any other environment, you’ll always be able to see the status of it, as well as be able to drill down further to get system health check metrics on the components of each environment.
Additionally, we’ll also be surfacing operational metrics such as the number of new quotes or claims filed over time. This functionality isn’t meant to replace the reporting capabilities available in Duck Creek Insights, but rather is meant to give IT executives a quick, 10,000-foot view of system usage trends, as well as aid day-to-day IT operations staff in understanding an issue with an environment should the need ever arise.
The Next Incremental Leap Forward in Duck Creek OnDemand
With the Duck Creek SaaS team continuing to handle the heavy lifting of managing upgrades, systems support, security, and more, Control Hub provides carriers an easy-to-use web interface to operate their applications more efficiently. Future builds of Control Hub will bring more automation, speed, and transparency to further enhance carriers’ ability to deploy, monitor, and control their core systems.
We built Control Hub with iteration in mind – meaning that we can and will be delivering continuous updates of new features and functionality to all our customers at the same time as soon as they become available. We have quite the product roadmap ahead – from providing increased visibility into system performance KPIs to enabling more control for carriers to schedule and promote their own configurations into production, we look forward to continuing to optimize the overall SaaS experience in Duck Creek OnDemand in the months and years to come.
