One of the largest and most comprehensive enterprise integration projects we have been involved in is Hochheim Prairie Insurance.

This project has spanned over 10 years and represents a complete transformation from a store and forward data model for writing insurance to an entirely online presence for all their lines of business.

This transformation has boosted a 10 million a year in premiums company to over 100 million a year in premiums.

Phase one of the project was a complete rewrite of the agencymanager system and consolidation of several policy types into a single consolidated line of business. Java was chosen as the language and environment for its broad acceptance and cross platform compatability. In the beginning, internet connectivity was limited in rural Texas and so we devised a store and forward mechanism for writing then sending new business to our custom servers at Hochheim. The new thick java client was an immediate hit and independent agents began using the new Agencymanager because of its ease of use and task specific implementation of a Policy Editor. The policy editor concept (using a Model View Controller paridigm) had never really been used in the industry to date. The thick client spoke to custom network based servers which spoke to the Fiserv SIS/IBM eSeries system using DJA formatted records and data queues.

The next major projects involved putting together an online presence for Hochheim. We choose JBOSS as our platform and began building a service oriented architecture to facilitate all business processes outside of the main policy editor. This included Claims, inquiry, and all the static informational pages and forms. During this phase we also added the ability to do endorsements on policies within the policy editor. This required integration with SIS's Tech21 server/protocol. Tech21 uses the industry standard Accord standard XML representation of insurance transactions.

Next we began the process of moving functionality from the agencymanager into the online system and started the process of transforming the Agencymanager policy editor to use services running in JBOSS 5 using EJB's, MDB's, Drools for rule validation and JBPM for business process management. At this point we have a policy editor that relies on being connected to the SOA JBoss 5 implementation. During this phase, also, we have integrated in IBMs content management into the AS5 implementation, added google mapping capability, Secured all communication with jboss using certs and servlet invokers. An entire user/role/ACL model has been developed with jboss. We also integrated CODE1 for address verification and the google api for geocoding locations. Also wrote a quick quoter so that the general public can get quotes easily and select an agent to send that prospective quote to.

With a running and successful AS5 implementation in place and performing well with a thick java client behaving as a policy editor for writing new business, the next transition was to move all the functionality except the policy editor into the online system. All reporting and delivery of AL3 data to external agency management systems was implemented.

The final phase of the transformation is the transition of the policy editor into an online version. This phase is especially difficult given that a policy editor literally deals with thousands of data entry fields. Anyone who has ever created a web based application can appreciate the magnitude of creating a fully functional and responsive data entry mechanism of this size. We are also facilitating mobile app development and transitioning to AS7 and the JSR299 model. We have transitioned most of our EJB SOA style services into RESTful services. A new and unique data field management methodology was developed to facilitate the massive number of data entry fields.