From Desktop to Terminal: How Fresnel Brought Claims Processing to the Frontline
Fresnel is an Indonesian insurance broker that manages flight delay and baggage compensation claims for Garuda Indonesia and Citilink, sitting between the airlines and insurers. Its Branch Officers process claims standing in an airport terminal in front of an affected passenger, but the process ran through IClus, a web-based application built for a desktop.
Fresnel partnered with Suitmedia to build a dedicated mobile application that could adapt the existing platform's business logic into a mobile-first workflow, one built to meet a strict two-minute claim approval SLA and Indonesia's passenger compensation regulations.
Why a Mobile-Responsive Web App Wouldn't Have Met the SLA
1. The obvious fix was to make the existing web application responsive on a phone browser.
That would have technically put IClus in a Branch Officer's pocket without solving the actual problem, because the constraint was never screen size. It was that the system was architected around a worker sitting at a desk, not one standing at a gate with a two-minute clock running.
2. The desktop system had no mechanism for enforcing time-sensitive coordination across three separate organizations at once.
A flight delay claim moves between a Branch Officer, an insurance team, and Fresnel's head office, and the two-minute SLA only means something if every party gets the update the moment it happens. A responsive web page doesn't create that coordination. It just makes the same disconnected workflow easier to squint at on a smaller screen.
3. The real trade-off was choosing SMS notifications over in-app push alerts.
Push is cheaper and richer, but it depends on the app staying installed and connected at the airport, conditions Suitmedia couldn't guarantee. SMS reaches a Branch Officer regardless of whether the app is open, which is the reliability the SLA actually required. Fresnel gave up richer messaging for a channel it could depend on.
4. Left unresolved, the cost was regulatory.
Indonesian regulation requires airlines to compensate affected passengers, and Fresnel's SLA obligations exist to keep that compensation moving on time. A workflow too slow to meet the two-minute SLA doesn't just frustrate a Branch Officer. It risks Fresnel's standing with the airlines and insurers it brokers between.
Building the Workflow Before Building the App
1. Adapting an existing web-based business process into a mobile-first workflow.
The application was built on Nuxt for the front end and PHP Laravel for the back end, with MySQL as the database. This gave an installable, app-like experience at the airport without the constraints of the original desktop-only interface. Also, Branch Officer and Head Office, Insurance, and Fresnel needed different views of the same claim.
2. The build started with discovery.
Suitmedia gathered requirements directly from stakeholders to identify where operational gaps lived and where SLA enforcement needed to live in the system rather than in policy. That discovery shaped the architecture directly: flight delay and baggage claims got separate information structures, features, and user flows.
3. That discovery phase directly shaped the architecture.
Suitmedia defined the application's information structure, features, and user flows separately for flight delay claims and baggage claims. Wireframes and UI designs followed, covering the dashboard, claim submission, document upload, approval workflow, reporting, and status monitoring.
4. The rollout moved through testing before it moved to production.
The application passed System Integration and User Acceptance Testing in staging before Suitmedia migrated it live, and post-launch support continued with monitoring, bug fixes, and documentation, treating launch as a checkpoint rather than a finish line.
What ICLUS Delivered, and What Isn't Measured Yet
1. The mobile application replaced the desktop-only claims process with a system Branch Officers can run from the airport floor.
Claim submission, document upload, approval monitoring, and status communication between operational and insurance teams now happen through one mobile workflow instead of a stationary web tool.
2. The integrated approval workflow and SMS notifications improved claim-status visibility and supported adherence to the two-minute SLA.
The SLA logic is built into the workflow. Whether claims are actually clearing in two minutes at scale, and at what rate, isn't something these notes report. There's no SLA compliance percentage, no average approval time, no claim volume figure, and no adoption number for Branch Officer usage after launch.
3. The regulatory compliance objective has the same gap.
The platform was built to help Garuda and Citilink meet passenger compensation obligations, and the workflow supports that requirement structurally. No compliance audit result, regulator feedback, or passenger compensation timing data appears in the notes to confirm the objective was met in practice.
4. What the notes do confirm is a scalable foundation.
Centralized reporting, structured role-based access, separated baggage claim processing, and ongoing monitoring and maintenance are now in place, which gives Fresnel a platform built to extend rather than rebuild as claim volume or regulatory requirements change.
Strategic Insights for the C-Suite
1. A time-bound SLA only survives digitization if it's built into the system's logic.
ICLUS's SMS notifications fired the moment a claim's status changed, so the two-minute SLA held regardless of who was paying attention, not because staff were told to hit a deadline. Executives digitizing any compliance-driven process should ask whether the deadline lives inside the code or only inside a policy document. If it's the latter, it's a hope.
2. Multi-organization coordination platforms fail when convenience drives workflow design.
Fresnel's claims process touches Branch Officers, an insurance team, and head office, three parties with different needs from the same data. Merging their workflows for simplicity would have been faster to build and harder to hold accountable.
Before funding a platform meant to coordinate multiple external organizations, map where responsibility for a missed deadline would actually land, and build the workflow so that point is never ambiguous.
