Operating as a conduit between the various life insurance companies, Astute Financial Services has to provide these organisations with a high quality service that offers customers accurate data and provides the brokers with an ease of use solution.
Although Astute has utilised Microsoft`s Great Plains solution, which serves as a strong backend system for automating the billing process of financial systems like this, for several years, the nature of the company`s business meant that upgrading their solution to the latest version required careful planning.
"As a company involved in the financial services sector, shutting down Astute`s system to do such an upgrade was simply unfeasible, so we had to put a lot of thought into exactly how it needed to be done," says Bells Fargher, general manager for operations at Parity Software.
Parity is a Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) Gold Certified Partner for the Great Plains solution, and is an established business that has more than two decades of experience in the industry.
"Although the actual upgrade itself took a single weekend, the entire process took a full month, from the planning stage to the point where it actually went live," she says.
"Parity did an off-site upgrade at our own offices, where we setup a server containing Astute`s current installation and then did a test upgrade, allowing for all issues to be resolved by the time we got to the go-live stage."
Fargher points out that the test upgrade enabled them discover any errors or problems that could occur during the real installation, as well as determining the time the real one would take to complete.
"The beauty of the off-site upgrade lies in the fact that although it took us days to perfect the test installation, when it came down to the real deal, we were able to complete in hours."
"In the end we performed the live installation over a weekend, and for Astute it was literally a case of switching off their Version 6 on a Friday and switching Version 8 on come the Monday morning."
According to Piet van Heerden, consultant: finance and administration for Astute, the weekend installation was critical as an absolute minimum of downtime was required.
"The integration with the financial transactions running through into our general ledger system is a continuous process, so we really needed it to be thoroughly pre-tested before the installation began, and then we needed to ensure that everything went smoothly," says van Heerden.
"Parity pulled it off superbly and we weren`t thrown out at all in terms of our business - and when you have 17 000 users, all running through this Web based system, you can imagine just how many transactions go through the system on a daily basis, so any downtime would have been critical."
Fargher points out that although it sounds simple, there was a lot more to the upgrade than that, as Parity also spent time before the upgrade providing training to Astute staff, so that all the users were au fait with the various new features of the system.
"We also provided a certain amount of `hand holding` for staff after the new version was up and running, just in case there were any small problems after the fact," she says.
"Basically it was all about proper preparation and about everyone being ready before going live, but this, after all, is our job and we have the industry experience to foresee most problems before they become an issue - this is why we`re developers!"
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