Company/Time frame: Virginia Farm Bureau (VFB), Richmond, VA February 2002 – May 2004
Position: Senior Project Manager
Project: Virginia Farm Bureau (VFB) wanted to replace their current billing, which was old, ran on a mainframe, was highly customized, and didn’t support true equity management with a newer, more flexible fully integrated billing system.
Challenge: VFB had little, to no experience with an implementation of this size along with a complicate converse from their old system to the new system. VFB had selected one vendor for the policy system (A1) and another system (Fiserv) for billing system using a highly integrated real time interface using IBM’s queued interface tools. The interfaces were complicated and there was little knowledge of IBM’s interface tools. In additions to migrating policy data, we also had to roll receivable balances from the legacy system to the new billing system and include in the initial bill produced by the system.
Action: I developed the overall schedule and tracked progress. We used prototyping to demonstrate the viability of the architecture. I assembled a team from resources from Orange, CA, Dallas, TX, and Atlanta, GA to complete the project. Business analyst were used to define requirements and configure the billing system to meet VFB’s business requirements. I pushed for and received approval to migrate a single line of business, farm owners, to the new system using a renewal conversion approach.
Result: The system was successfully implemented for the Farm owners line of business. Over the course of 12 months, 30,000 policies were migrated from the legacy system to the new policy and billing systems. However, the business relationship with A1, the company will provide the policy system, fell a part and management decided to not proceed with additional lines of business and to began looking for an alternative solution.