As Harleysville Insurance Com-panies, a multi-line insurer in Harleysville, Pa., expanded, new information systems proliferated. We were facing dramatic growth as a result of acquisitions and internal start-ups, says Bob Friend, application development manager for Harleysville.
We were running on various database structuresDB2, VSAM, flat files, SQL tables, FOCUS databases, ADABAS, Microsoft OLAP, Cubes, and others, he says. There was no established reporting standard, and creating reports was time intensive. Some reporting requests were simply impossible to fulfill.
Harleysville decided it needed to move its mainframe application to the Web to create applications that met the needs of employees and agents outside the home office, as well as establish reporting standards for the enterprise.
The installation has allowed Harleys-ville to become nearly 100 percent Web-enabled. Everything is completely HTML and Java-enabled and accessible with the click of a mouse, says Friend.
Once it had identified the problem and the direction it needed to take, Harleysville didnt have far to look for its solution. The company had been using the FOCUS program from Information Builders since 1986 as a data tool for departments needing individualized systems, such as marketing needing a system to store information on agencies.
Harleysville also used FOCUS to move all of its data and applications from VM to MVS. In addition to applications using Information Builders FOCUS, we had 10 years of financial reports written in Dynaplan, an old spreadsheet package, all of which needed to be converted, Friend says.
This conversion went smoothly. After the success of the conversion of all the financial reporting to MVS, we began using WebFOCUS to take all the reporting to the Web, he says.
Harleysville is not only using WebFOCUS for all its financial reporting but across the enterprise for other reporting needs, including claims, agency administration, and its commercial, personal, auto, and homeowners lines.
Friend says it was critical to select a platform that would support a large number of users in a distributed environment. More than 150 employees are using WebFOCUS Maintain in applications requiring data entry, including budgeting, warehouse inventory, an agency profile system for marketing, accounts receivable, and agency administration.
Every branch enters its own information for the agencies in its territory, Friend says. Thats why all of our Maintain applications are on the mainframe with IBM WebSphere, allowing us to benefit from the power and reliability of the mainframe environment. Data entry is done in Maintain, and all the reports are self-service with WebFOCUS.
Its all drop-down boxes, which eliminates a lot of errors, he says. As needs arise, our application development team, which now consists of four other programmers, can develop new reports using WebFOCUS Developer Studio. When an employee asks for a new report, we are able to create it immediately.
WebFOCUS gives Harleysville the ability to customize reports in real time with better access to the essential information and relationships. To target underwriting to specific niches, our actuarial department asked for an application that will show ratios of how the business is doing by state, agency, kind of business, all the way down to the SIC-coded leveland highlight important numbersparticularly if they are bad, he says.
After conversion to MVS, Harleysville put WebFOCUS on an NT server to report against SQL and DBA2 databases. We selected employees and managers who were power users and provided them with role-based access to standard reports and the ability to perform ad hoc reporting using WebFOCUS Managed reporting on the company intranet, says Friend.
To date the results have been overwhelmingly positive, Friend says. In six months, three people Web-enabled 10 years worth of legacy data. We increased value by providing over 1,500 users with quick access to timely data from diverse systems in the formats they expect. Robert Regis Hyle
CaseFile
THE PROBLEM: A proliferation of database systems needed to be streamlined.
The Company: Harleysville Insurance Companies
Web site:www.harleysvillegroup.com
Direct written premiums: $781 million
The Software: WebFOCUS by Information Builders
Web site: http://www.informationbuilders.com
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