Case studies: S&P, Thai Life Insurance

For example, CAT Telecom, the Non-Formal Education Department and TT&T have been using open-source software in their internal e-learning applications, while Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand has implemented open-source software in its operations. Similarly, the following are two case studies of two large private enterprises - S&P and Thai Life Insurance - that have adopted open-source software.

Luesak Chakrabandhu, deputy vice president, Information Technology Centre, S&P Syndicate, and, an owner and an operator of S&P Restaurant, said S&P has developed and has been using open-source software for eight years for its retail-operations and supply-chain systems.

The company's complex systems support a wide range of food businesses including S&P Restaurant, S&P Delivery, Blue Cup Coffee Shop, Patio Restaurant, Patara Restaurant and Golden Dragon Restaurant.  These has been powered by in-house software solutions, such as a point-of-sale (POS) system, sales-report system, inventory system, logistics system, and marketing and customer relationship-management system, based on open-source technology.

It has 1,000 computers and 1,000 POS machines implemented in more than 290 outlets located in 39 provinces across the country. It also operates four factories, three warehouses, four main offices and training centres. All systems are linked to the same database-management system.

"Our food business comprises perishable products, so an efficient management system is essential. Our front-end and back-end systems are linked to our database, inventory and logistic systems. All of these systems run on open-source software," Luesak said.

Luesak said the company incorporated open-source software into its IT policy three years ago, which helped the company cut costs as well as increase its work efficiency. 

"We required a system that could be customised according to our requirements. We developed the system ourselves and now spend only Bt20 million a year to operate it," Luesak said.

Thai Life Insurance has also benefited from this technology. Executive vice president Chaweng Chitsomboon said the company's core business solution - life insurance - involves a very complex system, which is currently being run through open-source software.

"We have been developing these solutions for 20 years and have worked across many platforms. For the last four years, the solutions are being developed with Java and run on the Linux platform. The life-insurance system being used by our competitors cost them about Bt1,000 million but we had to spend much less," Chaweng said.

All life-insurance core systems comprise three modules - underwriting, policy-service and claim-service modules. They have been developed by the company's IT team and run on 3,500 workstations in 254 branch offices located across the country.

About 3,000 of those machines run on Linux and just 500 are Windows-based. The company plans to shift all of them on to the Linux platform in the near future.

"We use open-source software to handle 3 million life-insurance applications and manage the training of thousands of sales personnel," Chaweng said.