Frontline Insurance

Frontline’s all-important agent portal was linked to a series of back-end systems, most significantly, a policy and claims administration system running on an IBM i platform. Frontline had been integrating its core policy and claims systems with the agent portal by updating files directly to the existing back-end system. This required writing data to intermediate files, rather than talking directly to the policy and claims administration systems application interface from the website. Redundant data had to be maintained simultaneously in both the web and IBM i environments.

With logic existing in two different places, the company was forced to duplicate maintenance. As an example, every time the team made a change to the back-end logic, the team also had to maintain a second change to the web environment. That process was not only cumbersome, but also meant that pushing new functionality out to web users took a great deal of time.