Financial Services: CSC's New CyberLife Enhancements Offer Real Business Value to the Insurance Companies

CyberLife is one of most important Life Insurance software products of CSC. With a large customer base worldwide, CyberLife is being used by some of the top Life Insurance companies across the globe.

CSC in US, CSC India’s partner for this project, is the main centre for development of new product features and support to the customer base. The CyberLife Host Development division at the partner end keeps on enhancing the product functionality by including appropriate customer customised modifications into the base system and providing additional features with each new product release.

The Host Development division interacts with the Customer Services division at the end customer end, who in turn assists the customers in customising and implementing the solutions around the CyberLife product.

CSC India Partners to Support Enhancements

US-LIFE-HOST-M, the CSC in India team, provides primary support for CyberLife product enhancements and retrofits to the client’s CyberLife Host Development team. Offshore work on the CyberLife product started in 1999.

The challenge of this project lies in writing detailed technical specifications for the product enhancements. The team always has to be ready to learn new systems like PerformancePlus, VPMS and XML and focus on the development work.

CyberLife Software Project Meets Major Milestones

The India Host Development team with the help of its partner has completed eight enhancements including three key enhancements for the CyberLife release 0601 from offshore. Additionally, the India team provides 24x7 System Test Coordinator (STC) support to the Host Development team at the client end. STC support from the offshore team has been substantial.

The three key enhancements for the CyberLife release 0601 are:

1. CMP014: A major enhancement to get real-time agent data for policies issued in CyberLife. It involves the CyberLife Agent system and the PerformancePlus system. CyberLife Agent is the custodian of the agent data for new business and PerformancePlus is the custodian for agent data once the contract is issued. The CMP014 enhancement acts as an interface environment so that whenever an enquiry is made from CyberLife about agent information for a specific policy, the information will come from PerformancePlus immediately instead of waiting overnight when batch cycles are run and most current data is made available next day.

2. ISS080: An enhancement that improves the plan description file (PDF) to allow plan information to vary for separate policies with the same plan code. User-friendly product marketing codes were also added to the enhancement.

3. UTL057: An enhancement that improves the CyberLife compare utility (CKOMPARE) making it easier to use and providing a more user-friendly report format. CyberLife development team uses the utility for comparing small files before and after file modifications and conversions. The comparison report after this enhancement enables easy review since the field names and values identified as miscompares are presented in a more user-friendly format. This modification involved major code changes.

The India Host Development team has completed eight releases with major involvement on more than 39 enhancements for all the product releases. The work as detailed has fetched the team an improved customer satisfaction and the customer is happy with the team’s efforts.

Winning Performance

The US-LIFE-HOST-M team has received many accolades on a continuous basis as a testimony to their hard work, technical expertise, commitment and professionalism. “It was tremendously helpful to have this work done by India. Matt is currently gearing up to attempt to get another project in this release and we will probably be calling in all hands again for the next round,” says Denise Dupree - program manager, CSC US.

Continuous innovation lets CSC offer real business value with software products like CyberLife. Working together, CSC in the US and India teams are using IT to fuel business growth.