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Overview:
Our customer required an application that
must be capable of running at various
client insurance companies with minimal
setup. The database must reside at our
customer's location. Additionally, their
clients must be able to download and
install the application with no
intervention from our customer. The
application must be able to access data
across the web in a transparent manner
and to act as though it is hosted
locally, at each individual insurance
company's location.
Situation:
Our customer has been providing an
application to their clients in the
insurance industry by installing the
software as a separate application at
each client location. This process has
caused incompatibilities with conflicting
applications at the client sites and has
rendered the application difficult to
work with. It has been costly to
troubleshoot the difficulties, as various
applications at the client sites
interfere with each other differently,
and advance knowledge of possible
conflicts is not available. Our customer
also needs to track data from each of
their clients in order to develop
aggregate figures for the industry.
Previously, this has been difficult due
to the individual installations of the
application at each site. A new
application was desired to easily allow
for the setup of the application as well
as the transference of data between our
customer and their clients.
Solution:
A Java application was developed that
looks and works from the client's
standpoint as if it is a locally hosted
two-tier application, providing rich
graphical elements. The data resides in
extensible database servers at our
customer's site, and there is no
installation required by the client.
There are no deployment or configuration
problems for client setup. The
application works by translating data to
the client from the application database.
Our customer is now better able to track
data from each of their clients in order
to develop aggregate figures for the
industry
Return on Investment:
- The easy, intuitive,
graphically attractive application
meets all stated requirements. It is
easy for clients to setup themselves,
with no intervention from our customer.
Its ease of use has made it popular
across clients and has maximized
profits.
- Our client can easily
collect and collate statistics from the
database which can be offered to
clients as an added value.
- Our developers have
designed and implemented the system so
that it appears as if it is a
traditional 2-tier system, even though
the data is hosted behind a middle tier
business rule layer. Therefore, when
enhancing the system, back-end
developers can add onto the database at
the same time that the front-end
developers are further developing the
user interface.
- High performance and
scalability for back-end data
processing allows for seamless
expandability. Additional insurance
companies and their data can be added
with no modifications having to be made
to the system, thus further reducing
costs.
The "Extra
Mile":
When we arrived at our customer's site,
the current models in place were causing
lost development speed and contentious
scalability. DSW proposed and gained
approval to create a custom component to
be built into the application to ease
integration between back-end and
front-end developers. Though this was
beyond our original scope constraints,
overall development time and cost were
decreased dramatically.
*Due to The DSW Group's confidentiality
policy, the names of our client are
withheld.
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