GuideOne Insurance Case Study
GuideOne Insurance Automates Disparate Job Scheduling Environment with Stonebranch's Opswise Universal Agent
Independent Scheduling Agents solution integrates leading insurer's mainframe and distributed environments, saving time, money and resources.
"Because of Opswise Universal Agent, 10 percent of three full-time employees' time was recovered, averaging a savings of $32,000 annually."
Sandee Lehman
Data Center Manager for GuideOne
Challenge
GuideOne Insurance, the leading insurer of churches, churchgoers and other faith-based institutions, uses ESP scheduler on its mainframe. Additionally, a few ESP agents are being used to manage their distributed platforms to help tie their processes back to the mainframe. When their initial purchase of ESP agents had been deployed, the process began to acquire more agents from the original vendor. Unfortunately, these agents had become very expensive. In fact, so expensive, that GuideOne could not justify additional purchases. However, the goal was still to automate all production processes in a cost-effective way.
Solution
GuideOne Insurance found the solution they had been looking for with Opswise Universal Agent, Stonebranch's Independent Scheduling Agents solution. Not only was the Stonebranch solution better priced, it was also easier to use and more robust. Sandee Lehman, Data Center Manager for GuideOne, said, "Our data center is 50/50 between a mainframe and distributed platform. We needed a solution that would integrate between both environments and route jobs to a central location." That need, along with standardizing into a production environment, which provides a central location for monitoring, will help GuideOne achieve Root Cause Analysis on any issues, implementing Irreversible Corrective actions, improving reliability.
Results
Since implementing Opswise Universal Agent, GuideOne Insurance has seen significant increases in productivity. Developers that once worked on scheduling and monitoring in the distributed environment were able to move on to development work. Lehman, said, "In fact, 10 percent of three full-time employees' time was recovered, averaging a savings of $32,000 annually." GuideOne expects that number to increase as Opswise Universal Agent matures in 2010.
- Centralized monitoring to improve integrity of processing
- Cost-savings of $32,000 in first year of implementation
- Better communication between IT departments
Karen Salmi, Data Center Support Analyst for GuideOne, said, "Opswise Universal Agent ensures the integrity of our batch processes. A process can be stopped when it needs to be stopped." With an integrated and streamlined scheduling environment that they can monitor, communication between departments has improved considerably if and when a situation arises, preventing delays from becoming mission-critical business issues.
Salmi notes, "Opswise Universal Agent has also simplified the auditing process while keeping us compliant." Both Salmi and Lehman were impressed by the hands-on approach Stonebranch took during the implementation process. In the future, Stonebranch representatives will hold a "lunch and learn" for GuideOne to continue the Opswise Universal Agent knowledge transfer to other team members.
Lehman notes, "Opswise Universal Agent just works and the pricing was a shoe-in for our CIO and the technology was vetted by our technical architect team."
About GuideOne Insurance
Founded in 1947 and headquartered in Des Moines, Iowa, GuideOne Insurance is one of the nation's largest church insurers, with nearly 43,000 church policyholders. GuideOne also insures private schools and colleges, as well as senior living communities. For more information on GuideOne, please visit: https://www.guideone.com/.
