The Company
AIG (American International Group, Inc.) is the world's leading international insurance and financial services organization and the largest underwriter of commercial and industrial insurance in the United States. Its member companies write a wide range of commercial, personal and life insurance products through a variety of distribution channels in approximately 130 countries around the world.
The AIG Oil Rig Division specialises in the provision of insurance services for the Oil sector, and has headquarters in New York and offices in Houston and London.
The Challenge
DataEase was adopted by AIG's Oil Rig Division in the late 80's when a former department manager developed two DataEase DOS applications, ATS and RUR, to track statistical information for insurance underwriting and processing.
Laura Talley, Underwriting Analyst 2, who has been with AIG for the past 7 years and is based at the Houston office, comments: "these DOS applications worked and served our business well for many years. All three of AIG Oil Rig's offices (Houston, NYC, and London) were able to enter data and export to all 3 locations. However, after some time, the system got too large and doing exports and backups became too much of an overhead."
Norman Rungasamy, Sapphire's project manager responsible for the AIG conversion project explains: "Both London and New York offices would run regular ASCII reports which would be then imported into a central database by Laura's office in Houston. There was no "live" database between the 3 offices and due to the large amount of data being transferred it became very impractical to maintain the data using this method."
The Solution
That is when Tony Morrissey, Manager of Sales & Marketing Services at Sapphire's US office, contacted AIG. Laura continues: "Tony showed us that changing systems would make our lives easier (which it has). We would be able to go live on a Citrix server and no longer have to do exports and backups. The DFD applications worked great but it was time for a change." The first step in that transition was to convert their two DOS applications to the latest version of DataEase - a task AIG commissioned Sapphire to perform based on their experience in doing hundreds of conversions and their expertise as authors of the DataEase software. The work commenced in February and was completed around May 2002. Norman continues: "Although AIG wanted to keep their two DOS applications exactly as they were, we were able to introduce a number of features from DataEase 6 to provide several improvements such as an easier to use layout and added functionality. These included dynamic lookups and customised styles."
Patrick Mitchell, Sapphire's Technical Manager in the US responsible for delivering the system at AIG and training staff on the new application, worked closely with AIG to set it up on their existing Citrix system and enable simultaneous access to DataEase from all three offices. The outcome AIG's verdict? A total success! In Laura's own words: "DataEase for Windows is more user friendly and the largest benefit to our division has been the ability for all 3 offices to be live on DataEase. It has made everyone's lives easier. Tony Morrissey has been fantastic. He has been there right from the start for any questions we had and we had many. Everyone at Sapphire was so pleasant to work with."