This company had purchased a portfolio of variable life insurance policies that allowed policyholders to lock in market return rates at anniversary, creating a significant investment risk for our client. The company had developed a complex investment model to minimize the risk, but without automation it was of little value.

A fully automated hedging application that analyzes 200 different trade scenarios each night and feeds real time updates during trading hours. Prior to our work, this financial model required 16 PCs to run for 12 hours each and had many points of failure. It now runs on one server in 8 hours with significantly improved performance and is scalable for exponential growth. It is capable of handling unattended, scheduled and user-initiated activity.

Our Role:

Vision Technologies designed the architecture for this system, served as the technical team leader for its development and coded its most complex components.

This system features parallel processing, publish/subscribe event architecture, and error handling and reporting. We used out-of-process servers to reformat, archive, age and group data, to create mark to market modeling with shock thresholds, to monitor database integrity, and to create multi-threaded asynchronous data updates. We developed the bean strategy and coded an Enterprise JavaBeans implementation of the mark to market component for the application. We also designed and coded a Windows NT Service to query the Service Control Manager in order to monitor and log the run states of other services at user-defined intervals.

Technologies Utilized:

Enterprise JavaBeans, BEA WebLogic, Microsoft Visual Basic, DCOM, Microsoft ADO.

Develop a superior method for administering intravenous medicine, using infrared communication technology, in a hospital inpatient setting.

A prototype of the system was developed, which was then used to assess the feasibility and success of this innovative concept.

Vision Technologies created the architecture for this prototype system, managed the development of its software and coded the entire application. The system involved combining and interpreting data from several sources, including patient and pharmacy software systems, an IV pump, and patient wristbands and charts. Features included the automatic loading of data into an application database triggered by the presence of patient and pharmacy reports created by the Meditech Hospital system; collection and validation of bar-coded data including user identification; and movement of data between a PDA and IV pump via proprietary infrared communication protocol.

Barcode ready PDA, Palm OS, Satellite Forms, CodeWarrier IDE, Infrared Communication.

Improve understanding of customer base, overall customer service, and call center productivity.

A system that provides the company with a consolidated profile of each customer and significantly enhanced call center functionality and efficiency.

Vision Technologies designed the object model and developed the middleware for the application. The system features business object data transfer, object brokering, error handling and reporting, and CICS DB2 and SQL Server data storage and retrieval. Our work also included designing and coding a utility for remote, unattended application upgrades; designing and coding components for ASCII to EBCDIC data translation (one million characters converted in less than one second).

Microsoft Visual Basic, COM/DCOM, Win32 API.

Streamlined and supported shop floor manufacturing processes and supply chain management functionality.

Vision Technologies created, connected and improved systems throughout this company. We also hired, supervised and trained the technical team that programmed and now maintains the new applications. Specifically, our work involved designing an application to manage and replicate enterprise data to be used by field sales representatives; developing numerous production control applications (including rework analysis and work order splitting); developing software for ISO 9000 and FAA certification programs, and developing libraries of reusable business and data access objects. Lastly we implemented VB programming standards and a system registry based data dictionary.

Insurance Company

Transform the entire business by redesigning systems and processes to improve all customer experiences.

Several robust applications that significantly improve the company’s ability to deliver outstanding customer service and that fit into the enterprise wide strategy, framework and standards for technology.

In a project of this magnitude, overall and individual system architecture is absolutely critical. Vision Technologies created architectures that ensured integration with the corporate strategy, framework and standards for technology. We also developed the architecture and technical design for these systems:

• An enterprise imaging system that manages customer specific collateral and accounting and trend reports. The system makes these documents available via the web to customer service representatives and health plan sponsors and participants. Its development involved integration with the corporate web site, security system, load balancing and automatic failover.

• A browser-based time management and reporting system for claim examiners. This system included cross platform data transfers/access and high availability on all platforms and automated data loads.

• A batch-oriented system for the generation of post-enrollment collateral documents for health plan participants. The system included implementation of vendor software, parallel processing and publish/subscribe event messaging via DCOM. Windows Terminal Server/Citrix WinFrame was leveraged for remote users to improve performance and control environments to facilitate desktop management and application upgrade paths.

FileNET Imaging Product Suite, ASP/COM on IIS Windows NT, JSP/Servlet/JavaBeans on IBM WebSphere/AIX, OS/390 B/2 UDB/AIX, Windows Terminal Server/Citrix WinFrame.