Name: LRS Output and Print Management software
Rating: 4 (1 reviews)
Author: Levi, Ray & Shoup, Inc.

The Company

Nordic-based insurer with more than 7,000 employees located across the Scandinavian market

The Industry

Non-life insurance products including auto, home, health, worker liability, and commercial property insurance The Requirements Migrate from existing Broadcom- supplied print management and document archive software using a rapid yet thorough migration process

The Solution

VPS, VPS/TCPIP, VPS/PCL, VPS/ PDF, DRS, DRS/Natural, VPSX, PageCenterX, data transforms

The Benefits

LRS software replaces outputrelated solutions in the customer’s IT environment, including print capture from key Software AG Natural and mainframe applications. Advanced document viewing/ archive functions provide greater f lexibility and access while helping the customer avoid hefty license fee increases. LRS’ skilled archive migration team simplifies moving legacy data to the more cost-effective LRS solution.

LRS helps Nordic insurer migrate legacy software to reduce cost, complexity, and risk

Organization

Formed in the 18th century, this Nordic insurance company provides personal and commercial coverage of many kinds with the exception of life insurance. Through their various subsidiaries, they have a strong presence in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.

The company prides itself on innovation, incorporating technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents to help them provide better, faster service to their clients. They also strive to implement sustainable business practices across their entire organization; an effort that earned them the highest score – AAA – from a global ESG rating agency.

IT Investments in a Time of Change

This commitment to leveraging technology for customer and financial success has sustained the company for many decades. Like most financial services providers, their IT environment contained a number of best-inclass applications running on platforms from IBM Z® (mainframe) systems to web-based mobile apps.

Such heterogeneous IT landscapes present a variety of challenges when it comes to capturing, storing, and safely delivering the business-critical documents used to provide f inancial services to policyholders. For example, key documents originating on IBM Z-based Natural applications from Software AG were routed to the proprietary mainframe-centric CA Spool, then delivered to printers and other output destinations.

Likewise, documents from Natural and other applications were stored for long-term archival and online viewing in the CA View and CA Deliver products the company had been running for more than two decades.

These document software solutions, originally licensed decades ago from the output management software companies that invented them, had changed ownership over the years through successive corporate acquisitions, first by Computer Associates (CA), and finally Broadcom, Inc. With each successive change in ownership, the license fees charged for continued product usage dramatically increased. Ultimately, these ever-rising costs prompted the insurer to seek better, more modern, and less costly output management alternatives.

Search for a Print Solution

The outsourcing partners tasked with managing the insurer’s environment searched the market for functional replacements for the Broadcom-owned CA Spool and CA View/ Deliver solutions. After considering a few alternatives, only one feasible solution was found: the time-tested family of enterprise output management solutions from Levi, Ray & Shoup, Inc. (LRS).

Several factors made the LRS® solution set uniquely suitable to meet the client’s needs. The first of these was the proven ability to capture, process, and securely deliver output from the insurer’s critical IBM Z-based applications. LRS’ VPS family leverages the proven reliability of the z/OS JES spool to ensure prompt and secure delivery of any document in any format from any application to any printer or electronic output destination. VPS® software and its extensions have been used in the world’s largest companies for more than 40 years.

Many of the insurer’s core business systems have been built using the Software AG Natural environment, and have been reliably running for decades. The DRS/Natural extension product from LRS provides a certified interface to allow Natural applications to write to the IBM Z JES spool instead of the CA-Spool Natural Interface (API) that would no longer be available after the removal of the Broadcom suite.

The proposed solution would also include VPSX® software, an open systems, platform-agnostic, output management solution designed to manage any document in any format to any hardcopy or electronic destination. Running on-premise, in the Cloud, or as a managed service, VPSX software provides secure, any-to-any connectivity that would serve the customers’ immediate needs during archive migration as well as future ones as their IT environment evolves over time.

Document Viewing and Archiving Challenge:

Replacing CA View/Deliver Insurance companies, like all financial services providers, are heavily reliant on documents in their interactions with customers, providers, and other stakeholders. Unlike manufacturers that produce physical products, the policy booklets, riders, endorsements, claims forms, and other documents between insurer and policyholder are the only physical proof of the parties’ business relationship.

As such, insurance companies are compelled by both self-interest and government regulation to preserve nearly all documents relating to policyholder transactions. In the case of this Nordic insurer, more than 20 years’ worth of documents were stored in their CA View/Deliver archives. This represented more than 9 terabytes of critical data stored in a software package for which the company expected to be presented with onerous upgrade fees during the next renewal agreement with software vendor Broadcom, Inc.

To help the customer preserve these documents in a cost-effective manner, LRS proposed migrating the existing CA View/Deliver archive to LRS’ PageCenterX® solution.

PageCenterX software provides scalable content management with automated indexing, encryption and advanced search features. End users can access archived documents using any web browser or mobile device.

As impressive as the PageCenterX software features were to the client, they would not help the company avoid the impending Broadcom upgrade fees without the ability to migrate 20+ years’ of existing data to the new solution. To address this need, technical experts from LRS’ Conversion Services team analyzed the customer’s document processes and metadata and developed a strategy to migrate the data stored in the CA View/Deliver archive to the PageCenterX solution. The team of LRS conversion specialists employed a set of conversion utilities honed over decades of customer engagements, enabling new reports to appear in the PageCenterX archive and historical CA View/Deliver data to be imported to the LRS viewing and archiving solution.

In both the past and present, the insurer has used the powerful formatting tools of IBM’s Advanced Function Presentation (AFP) technology to produce attractive, functional policy and customer communications. These AFP-formatted documents continue to be produced on the IBM Z platform using the same time-tested applications that have served the insurer well for decades. LRS data transforms, running on the IBM system Z mainframe, convert these documents into the widely-accepted industry standard PDF format for efficient and secure digital storage in the PageCenterX archive.

LRS Software:

Saving Time, Money, and More Like organizations everywhere, this Nordic insurer had invested much time and money developing IT systems to meet the needs of their customers and their business. When unexpected changes in license terms threatened to negatively impact their IT operations and bottom line, LRS’ proven software and expertise helped them avoid these costs and focus on serving the needs of their valued customers and other stakeholders.