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Q5: Read the Case Study and attempt the questions at the end of it. XYZ Income (referred as "Income"), one of largest insurers, has over 1.8 million po licy holders with total assets of PKR 21.3 billion. The insurer employs about 3,400 insurance advis ors and 1,200 office staff, with the majority located across an eight-branch network. On June 1, 2013, ncome succeeded in the migration of its legacy insurance systems to a digital web based system. The Herculean task required not only the upgrading of hardware and applications, it also required Income to st reamline its decade-old business processes and IT practices. Until a few years ago, Income's insurance pr ocesses were very tedious and paper-based. The entire insurance process started with customers me eting an agent, filling in forms and submitting documents. The agent would then submit the forms at bran ches, from where they were sent by couriers to the Office Services department. The collection schedule c ould introduce delays of two to three days. Office Services would log documents, sort them, and then se nd them to Program: BSAF Class & Section: BSAF4A Course Code & Title: AF2402 Management Information Systems Duration: 2 and 1/2 hours Instructor's Name: Dr. Muhammad Shafiq Total Marks: Thirty (30) Date: - June 2021 Submission Mode: Online departments for underwriting. Proposals were allocated to underwriting staff, mos tly at random. Accepted proposals were sent for printing at the Computer Services department a nd then redistributed. For storage, all original documents were packed and sent to warehouses where, o ver two to three days, a total of seven staff would log and store the documents. all, paper policies com prising 45 million documents were stored in over 16,000 cartons at three warehouses. Whenever a d ocument needed to be retrieved, it would take about two days to locate and ship it by courier. Refiling wo uld again take about two days. In 2012, despite periodic investments to upgrade the HP 3000 mainframe that hos ted the core insurance applications as well as the accounting and management information systems, it still frequently broke down. When a system breakdown did occur, work had to be stopped while data w as restored. Additionally, the HP 3000 backup system could only restore the data to the versio n from the previous day. This meant that backups had to be performed at the end of every day in a co stly and tedious process, or the company would risk losing important data. In one of the hardware crashes, it took several months to recover the lost data. In all, the HP 3000 system resulting in a total of si x days of complete downtime. That was not enough. The COBOL (an old programming language) pro grams that were developed in the early 1980s and maintained by Income's in-house IT team also br oke multiple times, halted the systems, and caused temporary interruptions. In addition, the IT team f ound developing new products in COBOL to be quite cumbersome and the time taken to launch new pro ducts ranged from a few weeks to months. At the same time, transaction processing for policy underwriting was still a batch process and information was not available to agents and advisors in real-time. As a result, whe n staff processed a new customer application for motor insurance, they did not know if the applicant was an existing customer of Income, which led to the loss of opportunities for cross-product sales, as staff had to pass physical documents between each other and there was no means of viewing an u p-to-date report on a customer's history on demand. Furthermore, compatibility issues between the HP 3000 and employees notebooks caused ongoing problems, especially with a rise in telecommuting. All this changed in June 2013, when Income switched to the Java based eBao Lif e System from eBao Technology. The software comprised three subsystems - Policy Administration, S ales Management and Supplementary Resources - and fulfilled many of the company's requirements, fr om customer orientated design to barcode technology capabilities, and the ability to support ch anges in business processes. Implementation work started in September 2012 and the project was c ompleted in nine months. By May 2013, all the customization, data migration of Income's individua I and group life insurance businesses and training were completed. The new system was immediately operational on a high-availability platform. All applications resided on two or more servers, each connected by two or more communication lines, allo f which were "load balanced." This robust architecture minimized downtime occurrence due to hardw are or operating system failures. As part of eBao implementation, Income decided to replace its en tire IT infrastructure with a more robust, scalable architecture. For example, all servicing branches wer e equipped with scanners, monitors were changed to 20 inches; PC RAM size was upgraded to 2G B; and new hardware and software for application servers, database servers, web servers, and disk stor age systems were installed. Furthermore, the LAN cables were replaced with faster cables, a fiber opt ic backbone, and wireless capability. In addition, Income also revamped its business continuity and disaster-recovery plans. A real-time hot backup disaster-recovery center was implemented, where th e machines were always running and fully operational. Data was transmitted immediately on the fi y from the primary datacenter to the backup machines' data storage. In the event of the datacenter si te becoming unavailable, the operations could be switched quickly to the disaster recovery site without the need to rely on restoration of previous day data. Moving to a paperless environment, however, was not easy. Income had to throw away all paper records, including legal paper documents. Under the new system, all documents w ere scanned and stored on "trusted" storage devices - secured, reliable digital vaults that enabled st rict compliance with stringent statutory requirements. Income had to train employees who had been ac customed to working with paper to use the eBao system and change the way they worked. As a resulto f adopting eBao Life System, about 500 office staff and 3,400 insurance advisors could access the sys tem anytime, anywhere. Staff members who would telecommute enjoyed faster access to information, al most as fast as those who accessed the information in the office. This allowed Income to view a summary of each customer over different products and business areas. As a result, cross-selling became easier, and customer service could be improved. Simplified workflows cut policy processing time and cost by half, and greatly reduced the time required to design and launch new products from months to days. Additionally, the systems allowed for online s upport of customers, agents and brokers. QUESTIONS 1. What were the problems faced by Income in this case? How were the problems resolved by the new digital system? 2. What types of information systems and business processes were used by Inco me before migrating to the fully digital system? 3. Describe the Information systems and IT infrastructure at Income after migratin g to the fully digital system? 4. What benefits did Income reap from the new system? 5. How well is Income prepared for the future? Are the problems described in the c ase likely to be repeated