Health insurer Medibank Private hopes its new policy platform will be be fully operational by next year, following implementation issues that delayed customer tax returns last month.
Medibank is most of the way through a $150 million overhaul of its core policy and customer relationship management systems that started four years ago.
Project DelPHI - the centrepiece of the effort - involves the replacement of Medibank's customer, policy, premium and product management systems with a single software suite based on SAP. IBM is leading the integration work.
But issues with the migration of data to the new platform meant most of the insurer's customers didn't get their annual tax statements by Medibank's July 15 deadline.
Medibank CEO Craig Drummond publicly apologised for the delay at the time, calling it "unacceptable". As of last week the health insurer had still not yet managed to fully rectify the issue.
Drummond today said getting the new core policy platform fully operational would be key to reversing negative customer perceptions about the insurer.
“Customers' needs and outcomes have to be our number one priority. To deliver on this we will need to increase our investment in our customer service and product offering," Drummond said.
"We know that we need to do more, and that we need to be easier to deal with. Key to this is the implementation of our new core policy management system, Project DelPHI."
He said despite the "initial implementation issues", Medibank expected the platform would be fully operational in 2017 and would "deliver a significant improvement to our customer experience".
Medibank recorded a $51.1 million increase in its net balance of intangible assets for its full fiscal year as a result of work related to the last leg of the Project DelPHI overhaul.
