Insurance Companies

Customer profile

One of the top five Property and Casualty insurance providers in America (and Fortune 100 member) uses DataKinetics® tableBASE® at the heart of all of its mission-critical claims processing applications.

Challenge

The organization had big problems—they had an antiquated I/O-intensive set of applications that were in serious need of modernization. Besides being I/O-intensive, their applications were also huge and complex, containing all of their claims business rules arranged within arrays internally. While reasonably fast at processing, when it came to change their claims business rules, they needed dedicated time and IT resources to modify the applications—for every change. The cost of doing business was getting out of control, and they couldn’t adapt quickly to changing market conditions.

They knew that new hardware could help them with the performance of their I/O-intensive applications.  However, it was a band-aid solution, and it did not address their change-control workflow problems. They needed to do more than throw money at their problems; they needed to do something smarter.

Solution

tableBASE was the solution to all of their problems. Their immediate need—to reduce the I/O dependency of their applications—was solved without a complete rework of their applications, or an investment in expensive new hardware. Merely swapping the I/O calls in their application to tableBASE API calls, and loading business data from their database into in-memory tables, their immediate problem went away.

Their second problem was not so easily solved, but was solved by the same technology that solved their performance problem. Again, tableBASE was the solution to their ongoing rules maintenance problem. By externalizing their claims business rules from their applications to in-memory tables, they found that they rarely, if ever, needed to update their applications. Claims business rules changes (which happened on a regular basis, as they adapted to their changing market place) now were managed by claims specialists, without the need for the involvement of IT staff to modify applications. In fact, rules changes could be implemented within a business day, or even on-the-fly.

Benefits

Their applications were no longer I/O-intensive, so the need to upgrade their mainframe hardware was no longer an issue. More than that, however, their ongoing maintenance costs for their own business-specific mainframe applications dropped off the spreadsheet. Their applications were now stable, needed little attention, while non-IT staff now managed their business rules changes.

Their 1.5 million customer policies generate a demand for more than 35 million database calls every day, something that their new applications can manage with ease—with room for growth. Not only that, they now can develop new applications very quickly—new applications that leverage in-memory tables for optimum performance and ease of maintenance, thanks to tableBASE.

With tableBASE at the heart of their mission-critical claims processing applications, they were able to reach the goal of becoming the fast-reacting, efficient organization that they were unable to achieve before.