While many of the winners of the RAVE Awards are major names in the insurance software industry, Management Data, Inc. (MDI), is an example of a smaller company staying focused on the needs of its customers.
MDI is an employee-owned company located in Birmingham, Ala. The company's award-winning product, FIMMAS, was released in 1984 and supports all life, annuities and specialty health products for both individual and group products, sharing common rules and configurable tables.
Patrick Michael, president of MDI, attributes the positive feedback the vendor received from their customers as a reflection on the company's culture.
“MDI has always been focused on customer service,” he says. “Being an employee-owned company, we can do whatever is necessary to ensure that our partners are successful without the need to justify our decisions to a board of directors. We are focused on results and not profits.”
Michael explains that communication between MDI and its customer base is what has made the vendor successful.
“We have regular meetings with our clients and we have an active user group that provides the strategic direction for the development and support of FIMMAS,” he says.
Although the FIMMAS product is nearly 30 years old, MDI continues to tweak it regularly and make it adaptable for the changes in the way business is conducted today.
“We have added several new integration points to the Internet, and allow for any report in FIMMAS to be automatically exported to external applications like Excel,” he says. “We have also added direct feeds to a chart and graphs that can be used to support a management dashboard capability. We have also added support for mobile devices.”
FIMMAS runs on UNIX, Linux or Windows servers, according to Michael, and is database independent.
“Most course-of-business changes are implemented through rules changes and stored in custom libraries as objects,” he says. “However, source code is available to clients to facilitate adding new rules when necessary. ACORD XML is one of many integration methods supported.”
Second Place Winner: Life PAS
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