 Mutual
Life of Canada (now Clarica), the lead company of the
Mutual Group, markets a wide range of financial products
and services including life insurance, investment products,
employee benefits, disability management services, financial
planning, annuities and pension plans.
FASTER ON THE MARKET WITH LESS
DEVELOPMENT TIME
A Solution for the Insurance and Finance Sector
The Mutual Group is a leading financial institution
in Canada and the United States with business development
under way in the Asia Pacific.
Key Decision Criteria For
Papyrus:
• Fast development time
• Manageability
• Product maturity
With PC based tools such as Excel and Access capable
of doing charts and graphs, the expectation quickly
moves to the mainframe based products. The DCF which
was used until now by the company for complex applications
and better output appearance was just not satisfactory.
Generating table of contents and "Page 1 of n"
support on a statement to statement basis was also not
possible.
The creation of a DCF tag file as input took the company's
developers up to 10 days on the average. It was desirable
to eliminate this time and to gain instant feedback
of the development cycle.
 Total
separation of the application from the output format
to provide total functionality, flexibility and accurate
documents for the lowest possible cost was the company's
goal in the selection of a desired product.
The Solution & The Benefits
To bring manageability under control, ISIS set up for
the Mutual Life, Papyrus DocEXEC formatter on MVS Host
and installed Papyrus Designer on Win95. The ability
to include and re-use components in common libraries,
i.e.. OMR markings for mailings are included by all
production applications. Further, everything is either
AFP format or a text file which means that programs
generate the appropriate codes or font definitions for
the user.
Excellent national language support illustrated to
Mutual Life, the completeness and maturity of the ISIS
product family. The fully integrated GUI designer offers
unlimited possibilities to get everything done without
leaving one application and entering another to do a
particular function. This includes the task of performance
profiling and application debugging.
A Papyrus user report by Don
Maxwell of Mutual Life of Canada.
Re: Our Year
End Production.
Hello Roberto..
Just thought you might be interested in
knowing that we have just completed the
running of our first high-volume Papyrus DocEXEC MVS
application.
Some of the
things we use:
1) |
We
are doing table of contents on the front page,
so this implies we format the first page last,
and then use the "PLACE AT" function
to get that page to the beginning of the page
buffer. |
2) |
At
that time we check the number of physical pages
to determine which postage class (output file)
the statement should go to. The break points are
1-5 pages, 6-8 pages, and
>8 pages. |
3) |
For
each of the above output files, we also check
to see if we have written 10,000 pages to the
file. If we have, we close off the file, write
an instruction sheet for our mailing machine inserter
operators (containing # pages, # envelopes, etc)
and start a new instance of the file. |
4) |
We
have a MESSAGES file that is used as a checklist
by the printer operators to ensure they have all
the output.. This is a WRITE to LOG file that
contains the set number, the number of envelopes
and the number of pages. |
5) |
We
flip back and forth from 1-column mode to 2-column
mode. |
6) |
The
OMR marks are totally done by re-usable routines
... these
are all INCLUDEd and they are the AIM*.DFA files. |
7) |
We
had to do some extra parsing of the input data
due to transactional items and execute special
widow/orphan controls. |
It
maybe interesting for your users to say that we did
this with 30 days of development effort, and we were
not 'well experienced' DocEXEC users. We did a lot of
learning on this application, but we're pretty pleased
with the results, especially the fact that it does all
of this in ONE PASS of the data file.
Some trivia
statistics:
We ran about 1.8 million impressions of output. We
had the job split up into 12 MVS batch jobs, and
the total elapsed time was about 7 hours.
My clients
are VERY pleased with what we accomplished, with the
robustness of the product, the throughput, and how quickly
we got it all done.
They are also
thrilled with the output. |
Turning Green into Gold - 