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QUALITY management LEADERSHIP award

Federated Mutual Insurance

Exceed DVR — Efficient Regression Testing

Problem: Federated Mutual Insurance needed to find an efficient way to ensure that Exceed releases would not negatively impact the company’s current use of Exceed. The company appreciated the in-depth testing CSC exercises with each release, but it has an extremely low risk tolerance. An error on the wrong account could cost Federated thousands, possibly millions, of dollars.

Solution: With business users working daily in Exceed, Federated needed to ensure that the system continued to work for everyone after releases were applied. So the company created an Exceed recorder that can store every production transaction in a database. Any subset of these recorded transactions can then be replayed in development regions where a release is installed. After the replay, the Exceed development database is compared to the production database. If there are no differences then transactions will behave the same after applying the releases! Any identified issues are analyzed to determine their impact. Negative impacts are reported and resolved or noted and accepted.

Federated has developed this testing method to use any percentage of production accounts. An intelligent account selection tool was devised to ensure that every identified critical function was minimally represented in the test suite. Testing can be replayed for as long as the backup data is retained. In theory, Federated could regression test 100 percent of production for all of time. In reality, the company regression tests until fear becomes boredom.

This process reasonably proves that Exceed’s Enterprise Information System layer will work tomorrow. CSC’s n-tier architecture allows Federated to visually inspect each screen to prove that the presentation services layer and the business services layer work.

Summary: Federated has developed an efficient regression testing process that complements CSC’s quality assurance. This process leverages the asset of company-specific production activity in order to prove that the activity will execute successfully after installing new releases. With its enhancement, Federated can confidently show how today’s activity will behave in tomorrow’s system.

Safety Insurance Group

Exceed C.0 Migration

On September 7, 2007, Safety Insurance launched Exceed 2.4.1 Billing, Claims, MIS and Disbursements for its homeowners line of business. The company’s objective was to stay close to base functionality in both the short and long term.

Safety began an Exceed C.0 migration in December 2009. Strategically, it was important that the migration did not impact 2.4.1 pipeline projects or day-to-day production support.

The company accomplished its objective by creating dedicated migration teams and system environments so that they could manage their business as two concurrent projects. Instead of merging the two plans as a replacement for 2.4.1, Safety planned a freeze of its 2.4.1 pipeline, cut over to the C.0 environments, and retired the 2.4.1 environments, making C.0 its new production system. The approach mitigated code collisions and priority conflicts, and it improved focus. On June 14, 2010, Safety went live with Exceed C.0.300 with only four minor issues.

A number of strategic actions contributed to Safety’s successes:

• Communication, including weekly status calls between CSC’s project management team and Safety’s senior management team; a portal tracking system that provided automated e-mail notification to Safety’s project managers; and weekly status calls with Safety’s business units during model office testing.

• Preparation, consisting of CSC’s comprehensive testing during construction, and coordination of the 2.4.1 model office pipeline with the cutover to C.0.

• The Cutover Plan, which required duplicate model office and production environments that allowed for parallel testing between 2.4.1 and C.0, and provided a strong restore plan; and a comprehensive plan for Safety and CSC to execute a two-day production conversion to C.0.

Safety is confident that with CSC, it can leverage these successes in future collaborative projects.

Safeway, Inc.

Safeway RISKMASTER X Implementation Project

Safeway and CSC teamed up in November 2007 for the implementation of RISKMASTER X and went live on February 16, 2010. Along with several custom solutions identified to meet Safeway’s business needs, the project also included 17 Innovation Community solutions that provide exceptional benefit to the CSC RISKMASTER X users' community. To extend added value to the users' community, Safeway promoted the development, execution and maintenance of high functioning project management tools and tasks. Tools such as UAT Test Case Documents, Bug/Defect Reports, Requirements Traceability Matrixes and Deliverable Reports were used to ensure project consistency, quality control, clear communication and accurate tracking. These tools were shared with CSC team members and became a skeleton for a thorough quality assurance process ensuring all specifications were met.

In an effort to bring a superior RISKMASTER X product to the business users in the Liability and Workers' Compensation groups, the Safeway/CSC team worked together for 3 years performing quality assurance testing on custom solutions, Innovation Community solutions and base RISKMASTER X with a feedback and resolution procedure. Through this unique QA process, all users of RISKMASTER X 7 will benefit from a more robust claim system that offers greater flexibility and functionality with consistency and quality.

Safeway is a leader in the industry and together with CSC will cut costs through the efficient use of RISKMASTER X. Through collaboration with the Innovation Community, Safeway and CSC fostered true teamwork to add or enhance 17 areas of functional design.

Westfield Insurance

Bodily Injury Evaluation Best Practices

Westfield Insurance has demonstrated excellent quality management leadership through its consistent procedures within its claims organization. The company’s history and expertise with bodily injury evaluation best practices includes its approach to consistent quality review, exceptional data analysis, and a core group of subject matter experts. Through these established policies and procedures and an engaged management team, Westfield has become an industry leader in facing the challenges and complexities of the claims handling environment.