|  The
insurance sector more than any other depends on the
relevant business document to be printed when and wherever
needed. Without the filled out application form or the
signed policy there simply is no business. Many of our
large insurance clients worldwide request a corporate
business document solution that can be used identically
for mass production and on the notebook PC of the insurance
agent.
Mainframe and Client/Server
Document Production in the Insurance Sector
These needs have led VGH in Hannover, Germany to set
up a joint service company called ivv with eight related
public insurers, using ivv's dp-services to strategically
rebuild their insurance applications and document production
for a platform independent future. While the insurance
applications are developed in-house, the document environment
was decided to be provided by a standard multi-platform
product. The new system runs on MVS mainframes and several
thousand PC's in their main and branch offices.
The Requirements:
| • |
High volume document formatting on mainframe
and server with the best possible result in formatting
time and CPU usage, while guaranteeing document
quality across platforms |
| • |
One-time WYSIWYG development of document and
resources such as text elements, forms, fonts,
logos, document logic, and so on, to be used from
the mainframe to the PC |
| • |
Incorporate text generated with mass PC text
products into the insurance documents |
| • |
Make the same forms (overlays) used for printing
on the mainframe available on the client PC |
| • |
Enable documents read/write database access
using standardized API or DDE functions |
| • |
Text building-blocks to be selected by the
user from a catalog |
| • |
Build interactive documents which prompt the
user to fill in or add data to a selected document |
| • |
View the generated document on the client
PC and print either locally on the LAN server,
or consolidate documents for merging and mass
printing on
a mainframe printer |
| • |
Give users access to previously generated
documents in an archive, while maintaining the
document's original content and quality |
The Benefits:
| • |
Development cost savings by defining the document
only once and using it on the mainframe, on different
server and PC platforms |
| • |
Management effort and cost reduction as only
one resource library is developed and maintained |
| • |
Increased flexibility because text is easily
defined by different users |
| • |
Full control of the corporate document design
and the document content on the user PC |
| • |
Improves customer response and service quality
by providing ad-hoc document generation |
How are these benefits achieved?
To enable the platform independence, IBM MO:DCA as
used by the Papyrus Document System, was chosen as the
base architecture. In this manner documents are not
dependent on a certain operating system platform.
All documents and related resources such as fonts and
forms are developed using the Papyrus Designer with
it's 100% WYSIWYG capabilities. Mass production and
user-interactive documents are developed with the same
design tool.
The Papyrus DocEXEC formatting engine is used on all
platforms such as MVS/ESA, OS2, Windows NT, 95, 98,
2000 and 3.1 to ensure absolute document reproduction.
The Papyrus Client enables simple text entry, document
viewing, data merging and formatting, and local printing
of standard customer documents.
Summary:
"We have chosen ISIS
to build our company's document solution after evaluating
ten different document products", says
Mr. Scholz, Project Manager at ivv. "The
Papyrus Document System provides a standard architecture
and a clearly defined strategy across all platforms
with simply the best tools for document application
development." |
