South Carolina Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance (SCFBMI) has modernized its mainframe applications through the use of enterprise application modernization software from the technology firm Micro Focus. The software application has delivered efficiencies to the insurer that will net the carrier approximately $620,000 in annual savings.

Bert Young, vice president of information technology for SCFBMI, agreed to answer several questions from PropertyCasualty360.com on how this technology implementation has improved operations there.

PC360: What specific challenges did your company hope to solve through the implementation of the Micro Focus product?

Young: There were four challenges that we hoped to resolve.

Expense reductions: Though we outsourced our mainframe operations and were able to share costs, we were looking for a less expensive alternative to the mainframe environment. The Micro Focus solution provided those expense savings, which amounted to approximately $620,000 a year.
All new development over the past six years had been positioned on the Microsoft Server platform using Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server (TFS), so we were also looking at moving the mainframe developers to the same development platform that our .NET developers were familiar with. Micro Focus gave us the ability to use these tools for COBOL development, allowing us to standardize our development lifecycle using TFS and Visual Studio.
Relational database support for both DB2 and SQL Server became more and more costly. Micro Focus provided an opportunity to convert all our DB2 data to SQL Server so we only had to support one environment.
Moving to a server environment also provided an opportunity to improve our testing environments so that we would parallel production and our .NET deployment process. We were able to develop a quality assurance/staging environment that mirrors production in every way including the automated scheduling and data volume. We are now developing a full-functioning integration environment for the COBOL developers to test.

PC360: What were the determining factors in helping you decide on the Micro Focus solution?

Young: We looked at the Micro Focus solution two different times over three years before we made a final decision to present the project to our Steering Committee. We were looking for a solution that would run COBOL and JCL as it was on the mainframe with little or no change required, and Micro Focus provided the best option. Micro Focus supported SQL server, TFS and Visual Studio development, which in turn supported our strategic development direction.

PC360: How has the Micro Focus solution worked thus far? Can you give any specific examples of how operations have improved?

Young: The first month after the conversion was difficult as we fought problems that often arise with new implementations, specifically with our month-end processing and online check processing system. After the first month, things began to settle down. The user community did not see any difference in online response times even though we not only converted the software but also the DB2 data to SQL Server. Our nightly batch process ran about the same amount of time in the beginning, and we were able to reduce the night cycle by two hours after further tuning of some of our batch applications. PC360: How did this solution fit into SCFBMI's overall business strategy?

Young: The expense reduction was a goal that we were able to achieve very quickly, which fit into our core business strategy.

PC360: What sort of problems did your company encounter during the implementation and how did you and Micro Focus go about resolving those issues?

Young: The biggest challenge we had in the beginning was making sure all the third-party products worked well with Micro Focus. We had to implement server-based job scheduling (ZENA) and print distribution products (VPSX) at the same time, so they offered challenges as well. There were times that Micro Focus and the third-party vendor would work together to find a solution to an issue. Our biggest issue came up several months later after we applied a service pack that affected our third-party products. We held weekly status update conference calls, and all the issues were resolved within a couple of months.

PC360: What do you believe made this implementation special for SCFBMI?

Young: For us the implementation was special because we did not just move a business unit or an application to a server environment, but rather we replaced the mainframe completely. For example, here are a few statistics from our conversion:

Converted and compiled 6,600-plus mainframe COBOL programs and copybooks to the Micro Focus environment.
Converted 800-plus batch jobs (JCL) to the Micro Focus environment.
Converted 300-plus sequential and VSAM files consisting of over 88.5 million records to the Micro Focus environment.
Converted 450-plus relational database tables consisting of 805+ million rows to the Microsoft SQL Server environment.
Converted mainframe batch schedule (ZEKE) to the distributed platform (ZENA) and made modification necessary for the new environment.
Converted print distribution products and all print from VPS to VPSX.

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