Entelect x Sanlam - Customer Success Story

How Entelect helped Sanlam modernise a decades-old retirement platform with Claude Code

Building digital products that work in the real world – across complex architectures, and shifting user expectations – requires more than good design. At Entelect, we cover the full stack of digital product engineering: from strategy and user research through to channel engineering, platform integration, and customer engagement. We build products that are structured to scale, with cross-functional teams committed to continuous development and ownership.

Summary

Building the foundation for future technology decisions

Personal Group, a UK provider of affordable insurance and employee benefits, wanted a trusted, enterprise-wide view of its technology estate to guide future investment, governance and modernisation decisions. Working with Entelect, a two-person team used Claude Code and Claude Cowork to analyse more than 70 applications spanning three generations of technology and establish a comprehensive enterprise architecture baseline in just five weeks, reducing the estimated five months of manual analysis required through a traditional approach by approximately 70%, while achieving the same level of detail and quality.

With Claude, Personal Group and Entelect:

Analysed 70+ applications spanning three generations of technology
Reduced the estimated time required for enterprise architecture analysis by approximately 77%, from five months to five weeks
Built a Claude-powered reverse-engineering harness using bespoke skills and agents to analyse application codebases at scale
Used Claude Cowork to synthesise technical findings with workshop recordings, transcripts, documents and screenshots
Established an application catalogue, architecture diagrams, governance processes, architecture decision records and investment ratings
Created reusable AI-assisted capabilities that can continue beyond the initial engagement

The Challenge

Creating a trusted view across three generations of technology

Personal Group's technology landscape has evolved over time to include core insurance platforms, legacy applications and modern business solutions. With newly appointed Technical Leadership shaping the organisation's future technology strategy, Personal Group wanted greater visibility across the systems, applications and technologies underpinning the business.

The scope covered more than 70 applications across three generations of technology, with discovery, analysis and documentation to be completed within a five-week engagement. Personal Group needed enough breadth and depth to support strategic investment, governance and modernisation decisions while establishing an enterprise architecture capability that could continue to guide technology planning beyond the initial review.

AI wasn't part of Personal Group's original requirement. The organisation engaged Entelect to conduct the enterprise architecture review, but the breadth of the estate and the level of analysis required created an opportunity to rethink how that discovery could be completed within the available timeframe and budget.

The Solution

Combining Claude-powered discovery with architectural expertise

Entelect introduced Claude Code and Claude Cowork alongside its enterprise architecture expertise to accelerate the discovery and analysis process. Using Claude Code with Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 4.6, the team created bespoke skills and agents capable of reverse engineering application codebases and extracting relevant application and architectural information. These components were brought together into a custom reverse-engineering harness that could apply the approach across Personal Group's technology estate at scale.

Claude Cowork provided a second layer of analysis, bringing the outputs from the reverse-engineering process together with additional context from workshop recordings, transcripts, demonstration documents and screenshots. This helped the team establish Personal Group's enterprise architecture space in Atlassian Confluence, including architecture diagrams, governance processes, architecture decision records, an application catalogue and investment ratings indicating whether applications should be tolerated, invested in, migrated or eliminated.

The AI-assisted outputs accelerated the team to a first human review rather than serving as the final architecture assessment. Entelect's architects reviewed and validated the resulting information to ensure it was consistent, accurate and suitable for ongoing technology planning. Personal Group and Entelect also jointly refined the AI-assisted approach during the engagement, creating reusable capabilities that could continue to be developed after the initial review.

This work gave us a much clearer, enterprise-wide view of our technology estate and a stronger foundation for making informed decisions about where we invest and modernise. The combination of Entelect’s architecture expertise and AI-enabled approach allowed us to achieve a significant breadth and depth of analysis within a short timeframe, while establishing a capability we can continue to build on.

Karen Thornley Chief Product Officer, Personal Group

The Outcome

Turning months of architecture discovery into five weeks

In five weeks, Personal Group gained visibility across more than 70 applications spanning three generations of technology, establishing an enterprise-wide architecture baseline in approximately 77% less time than the estimated five months required through a traditional approach. The two-person team achieved this while maintaining the same level of detail and quality.

The engagement produced a comprehensive application catalogue supported by architecture information, governance processes, standards and oversight structures. This gives Personal Group a more trusted foundation for evaluating where technology should be invested in, modernised, migrated or retired, helping move technology planning towards more proactive, informed decision-making.

The work also created value beyond the five-week engagement. The Claude-powered reverse-engineering harness developed during the project has since been generalised and reused by Entelect on other customer engagements, while the capabilities jointly developed with Personal Group provide a foundation that both organisations can continue to build on.