Farm Bureau Insurance of Michigan is like many other insurance companies in that it has multiple policy administration systems in production. The challenge FBIM faced was improving customer service. When a customer needed service, the carrier did not have a consolidated view of the customer. "We were unable to access the customer information and seamlessly move between policy, billing, or claim information," says Sandy Dent, FBIM's director of application development and technical research. "Nor could we easily access the policyholder's documents in an integrated fashion."

The carrier also faced a second challenge: While newer applications are being written in a Web-based environment, most of FBIM's data is locked in legacy mainframe file formats.

The company did not have a relational database in place, explains Dent. "These Web-based applications needed to access the mainframe data," she says. "The method we were trying to use was cumbersome and required a lot of maintenance."

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