http://ibagroupit.com/print/en/case-studies/service/development/insurance-support.html

Insurance Applications Support


Industry

Insurance (vehicle, property, and life insurance)

Customer

Our customer is the largest Austrian insurance trust

Project Overview

Implemented since October 2004, the project is designed to provide maintenance and support for the end users of a set of insurance–specific applications.

Environment

Operating Systems z/OS, Win2000, WinXP

Databases DB2, IMS, MS Access

SW used Pers.Comm., MAESTRO II, Citrix, MS Access, Castor, Crystal Reports, MS Excel, MS Visio

Application/DB Server Enhydra Application Server, MS SQL Server

Programming languages PL/1, Assembler, C/C++, Java, VB

Hardware IBM Mainframe, IBM PC

Project Execution

The project is carried out in close cooperation with the customer. IBA responsibilities include:

  • End user support (Second Level Support): consultations and support for application users.
  • Basic Maintenance: Error fixing in the supported applications.
  • Enhancements: providing of changes and enhancements to the existing applications, development of applications to support the processing department's DirectMail (e.g.: development of software programs to process addresses).
  • Application development projects (AD projects): Enhancement of legacy applications, as well as application development and support, including migration and installation tasks.

IBA renders the following services:

  • Error fixing
  • Micro design
  • Programming
  • Testing
  • Problem and error analysis
  • Support in planning and cost estimation

A total of 28 IBA Minsk and IBA CZ employees are engaged in the project. Of these, 27 are German–speaking.

All project documentation is provided in German, the correspondence and discussions are carried out in German as well.

The first phase of the project was called Transition and included knowledge transfer. IBA employees acquired sound knowledge of applications, database models, application interaction, and network infrastructure. IBA experts elaborated the Application Information Document (AID) that contains basic technical and business–specific description of each of the supported applications and serves as a Single Point of Information about the applications.

Since September 2005, the project has been in the Steady State phase.

Project Results

The IBA team has acquired the needed skills and continually shows its professional excellence when rendering support for 25 customer applications. End users express their ultimate satisfaction with the application support.