Taking the Next Step with AB Suite 5.0 and ClearPath ePortal

Since our inception in 1937, United Fire Group (UFG) has remained sharply focused on serving the best interests of our customers and the communities in which they live.

Today, this commitment extends across more than 1,200 independent agencies in 43 states, plus the District of Columbia, as well as the 36 states in which we act as a life insurer through another 900-plus independent agencies.

This broad national presence, coupled with our ability to balance technology with personal relationships – and offer a diverse selection of products and best-in-class services – has helped UFG become the clear company of choice for independent agents and their customers.

Since technology pervades so much of what makes UFG the company it is today, it’s only fitting that we do everything in our power to keep the systems that drive our day-to-day operations as contemporary as possible. One such application is ACL, a complete commercial lines policy processing system with over 3,000 Ispecs that started on LINC in 1987 and is now built in Agile Business Suite (AB Suite™).

In the spirit of staying current, we decided to move from AB Suite 4.0 to AB Suite 5.0 in 2015. It was a commonsense move – keeping pace with the most recent release means we’re able to benefit from the latest fixes and features available in AB Suite.

From AB Suite 4.0 to AB Suite 5.0

We made sure to do a fair amount of testing before we made the move to AB Suite 5.0. One of our smaller systems ran a complete cycle of daily activity for the online application, as well as a few reports, and compared the outputs and extract files produced by AB Suite 4.0 and 5.0 with each other using a tool called “multi-edit.” We also ran some test reports that cover a variety of functions.

Once we completed the test, we made the move to AB Suite 5.0. It took a few weekends to get everything on our three development servers updated and rebuilt, but the Unisys support team was available throughout the process to help us quickly resolve issues or answer questions.

Response to AB Suite 5.0 has been great. Our developers didn’t require any additional training and quickly began to appreciate many of the environment’s newest features. In particular, they were happy to see that reports built faster and appreciated that the GLB.PARAM had increased to 262k.

With the help of additional DASDL properties, they no longer have to manually adjust the DASDL during the RTU. Cutting and pasting from the help menu and using the option to “find all references” also resonated with the team. And in particular, I loved the ability to find the length of an attribute, along with the template, by simply hovering over it in a logic page.

The Next level: Going Mobile

Application modernization is another important facet of keeping technology current and optimally suited to serve our employees’ and customers’ needs. So, in addition to implementing AB Suite 5.0, we also examined ways to make our application modernization strategy as strong as possible.

As Scott Minkel, our Enterprise Architect, describes it, our goal when it comes to modernization is to enable desktop PCs, tablets, and smartphones to access our applications in a way that delivers the appropriate functionality to the intended audience. To help bring this strategy to life, we chose the ClearPath ePortal for MCP.

After evaluating a couple options, we found ePortal to be more feature-rich, offer better integration with Microsoft® Visual Studio®, include more project types, and provide the flexibility to create our preferred interface without limitations.

Our first step with ePortal came in the form of a pilot project focused around moving our Project Tracking System – an application with an ASP web front-end – to ASP.NET and updating it with a modern look and feel similar to another piece of software we use elsewhere in the company. It was a successful project that gave us the confidence we could use ePortal to achieve our modernization goals.

To that end, we’ve thus far successfully migrated all AB Suite generated ASP applications to ASP.NET and have also converted a third of them to MVC incorporating Bootstrap and responsive design principles. Additionally, we extended our AB Suite developed quote functionality to our agent portal, provided our marketing representatives with a reporting application they can access via a smartphone, and deployed web service integration back to our AB Suite application.

These projects are a great start, but there’s certainly more we’d like to achieve with ePortal. For instance, by the end of the first quarter of 2016, we plan to release an updated version of our Commercial Lines and Bonds web applications, and also want to roll out new features for our mobile application.

We have five dedicated ePortal developers managing these efforts, all of whom have C# and web development programming backgrounds, but no previous experience or exposure to AB Suite. Rich experiences with Visual Studio and a strong understanding of C# and web development are keys for success with ePortal, as my colleague James Sharman likes to say.

As our successes with ePortal have shown, it’s a tool that can really help an application modernization strategy reach the next level.