Date of Award

Fall 9-1-2006

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Information Systems (MSIS)

First Advisor

Ronghua Shan

Second Advisor

Omar El-Gayar

Abstract

The idea for this project was born in a meeting of supervisors in my department at Continental Western Group (CWG) Insurance Company. This meeting took place about nine months ago in January of 2006. We have a system in place to generate letters that are sent to policyholders and agents based on specific criteria for each letter. The system was put in place three years ago and although it serves its purpose much better than its predecessor, it has caused us many problems. During our meeting my immediate supervisor and the person that supervises the other team of Business Systems Analysis (BSA) were expressing frustrations with the issues revolving around this letter generation system. The most concerning of the problems was related to our renewal maintenance system. Our policy processing system is a COBOL based system with fourth-generation tool built around it. Renewal maintenance is one of these has several roles, one of which is to create the data file that the renewal letters get their data from. It had gotten to the point that we were using too many of what we call "L" specs and it was taxing the COBOL resources on the entire system. Multiple times over the three years we had been using this system the BSA's would be testing a new letter, and while running a COBOL utility program required for testing would lock up the system. We would then have to open a service ticket with our sister company, Berkley Technology Services {BTS). The answer we continually got back was "you have exceeded limits in renewal maintenance". This meant waiting sometimes several weeks for a resolution. As we discussed the issue more problems were brought out, those will be detailed later in this paper. One of the ways we verified that our letters were attaching to the correct policies was to write a query against our premium data warehouse (know as DSS). The BSA group had grown knowledgeable using the SQL editor from Informix and it had become very easy to write a query that parallels the pre-condition set up in renewal maintenance. My suggestion was to forget out dealing with the renewal maintenance system and replace it with a query against DSS that would check all of our renewal letters. Both my supervisor and the other team lead liked the idea so I started to do some research and see if it was feasible. By the spring I had determined that this project was a go, but we would need input from our data warehouse team, the environment support team, the transaction programming team and the BSA group. Also we had to make sure the work flow of the mail room staff and print operations was not adversely affected. They also had to be in the loop on any changes pertaining to their duties. I starting to go forward with this project but because we already had a system in place, it was giving a low priority. What the project became was a group of several deliverables. First there where the letters, they are broken into two types, policyholder notices which are mailed to policyholders and are for information purposes only, but required by law and renewal letters which are sent to the agents and sometimes policyholders, but they require some sort of response from the addressee. The system also included certificate of mail reports, which are required by the post office on legal mailing of this sort, they use them to verify the proper number of letters were sent. Since the renewal letters didn't need a certificate of mail we decided to create a verification list for them also, this is called a policy list. We decided to utilize a tool called Hyperion Intelligence Explorer and the Hyperion Performance Suite to produce the certificate of mail, policy list and some of our letters for the collector car line. We phased out not only the renewal "L" specs but also a scheduled job using MS Access. As the planning grew the main goals of this project centered around eliminating the renewal "L" specs, replacing the MS Access Database with Hyperion Intelligence and cleaning up several lingering issues with the existing system that were manipulating the time of most of the BSA staff. A final goal was improve the quality and efficient of our testing procedures.

Comments

dsu-th-114

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