Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Debit Card Benefits Firm Builds Solution to Handle Twice the Customers with Same Staff
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Healthcare Insurance
Customer Profile
The Evolution Benefits Benny debit card applies advanced payment technologies and pioneering electronic substantiation methodologies to tax favored employee benefit programs.
Business Situation
As its business grew, Evolution Benefits needed to unite the functionality of three separate applications into a single code base and merge separate data stores into a centralized database.
Solution
Evolution Benefits rewrote its business applications using Microsoft® Visual Studio®.NET 2003 and the Microsoft .NET Framework, and centralized three separate data stores onto a Microsoft SQL ServerTM 2000 database.
Benefits
360-degreeview of the customer
Increasedoperational efficiency
50 percent faster development
Faster access to third-party data
Time saved with Reporting Services / “Our new application brings all data together on a central SQL Server 2000 database, providing a 360-degree view of the customer.”
Paul Chabot, Vice President, IT, Evolution Benefits
Evolution Benefits is revolutionizing healthcare payment methods by enabling organizations to offer employees a convenient debit card to pay for eligible expenses. The company’s BennyTM debit card program is so popular that rapid business growth was challenging its software infrastructure. In response to client requests and the need to expand capacity, the company rewrote four applications that had previously required use of separate logons, interfaces, and databases. Using Microsoft® Visual Studio® .NET 2003, the .NET Framework, and SQL ServerTM 2000 running on Windows ServerTM 2003 Enterprise Edition, the company created a unified application and a centralized database using a common, extensible system architecture. The solution has doubled system capacity without requiring more operational staff, improved timeliness of access to third-party data, and enhanced partner integration.
Situation
Evolution Benefits offers innovative debit card technology that supports the consumer-driven movement in healthcare by allowing cardholders to conveniently access their flexible spending, health reimbursement, and health savings accounts on one card. Participating employers, working through third-party administrators, provide Benny debit cards to participants for eligible healthcare expenses. Benny debit cards eliminate the paperwork and hassle required by traditional tax favored benefit programs.
The benefits debit card has proven so popular that the company more than doubled the number of Benny cards it issued and supports within just a 12-month period. The company’s rapid growth placed demands on the IT infrastructure used to support the cards. The original solution was based on four separate applications.
The separate applications meant that program administrators—at Evolution Benefits and its partner sites—needed to logon to four separate systems, and had to deal with three separate user interfaces and three separate databases. This made it difficult to get a complete view of a client’s account. The original application code had been created using Microsoft® Visual Basic® version 6.0 and Visual Basic .NET development systems and ran on the Microsoft Windows® 2000 Advanced Server operating system.
The company, seeking to provide a better user experience for its customers, decided it was time to create a completely new solution that would:
Unite the functionality of the separate applications into a single code base.
Merge the three data stores into a centralized database.
Support single sign-on, role-based authentication to enhance security and the user experience.
Provide a more flexible reporting solution.
Create a platform to easily handle future product enhancements.
As is often the case, time to market was critical. To meet customer peak cycles, the entire solution needed to be completed in less than a year.
Solution
Evolution Benefits, interested in creating a completely new solution, began by deciding which operating system to use. It considered Linux, but decided to remain with Windows. “The total cost of ownership with the Microsoft technology was low enough that we didn’t see a reason to change from a technology we already knew,” says Sean Erwin, Assistant Vice President, Development, Evolution Benefits. “And we value the productivity we see when working with Microsoft development tools and technologies.”
Working with Tallán, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Internosis, also a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, and with Microsoft Services, Evolution Benefits created its new infrastructure in less than nine months using the Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET 2003 development system and the Microsoft .NET Framework version 1.1. The .NET Framework is an integral component of the Microsoft Windows operating system that provides a programming model and runtime for Web services, Web applications, and smart client applications.
Microsoft Services provided overall solution architecture and product architecture expertise, while Tallán and Internosis provided the technical skills necessary to augment the Evolution Benefits team for overall design and development of the solution. “A key to the project’s success was the close teamwork between Microsoft [Services] and our development team,” Erwin says.
The four separate applications—one for transaction history, the second for new customer set up, the third for substantiation to verify that all Benny debit card purchases are eligible under IRS regulations, and the fourth for cardholder access—were united into a single solution. The newly developed platform serves as a central repository for employer and member transaction history, and as a coordination hub for related transactions with business partners. The hosted solution is based upon a flexible, extensible platform architecture which takes advantage of the integrated capabilities of Microsoft Windows Server SystemTM, and Visual Studio, in order to minimize development effort, and optimize operational and support costs of the running system. Highlights of the architecture include:
A presentation subsystem based on a load-balanced cluster running the Enterprise Edition of the Microsoft Windows ServerTM 2003 operating system, the foundation of the Microsoft Windows Server Systemintegrated server software, and Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) version 6.0, the Web server that comes with Windows Server. Custom Web application code runs on Microsoft ASP.NET, which is tightly integrated with IIS 6.0. Developers used the forms authentication feature and identity and principal objects of ASP.NET to help ensure security. Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server (ISA) 2000 provides application-layer firewall protection and Web caching. The presentation subsystem runs on Dell PowerEdge 2650 servers.
An integration subsystem that runs on Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition, and uses Microsoft BizTalk® Server 2004 which connects people and systems together through manageable business processes that help customers to orchestrate interactions in a highly flexible, highly automated manner. BizTalk Server acts as a central hub and is used to perform extraction, transformation, and loading on data arriving in flat file and other formats from business partners such as insurance companies and third-party administrators. BizTalk Server also transforms data back to required formats when sending transactional information and other data to partners. The integration subsystem runs on two Dell PowerEdge 2650 servers.
A database subsystem that runs on Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition and SQL ServerTM 2000 Enterprise Edition, part of the Microsoft Windows Server System integrated server software. The database is deployed as a three-node (active-active-passive) cluster for high availability and uses a storage area network. The database subsystem runs on Dell PowerEdge 6650 servers.
A platform monitoring subsystemthat runs on Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition and Microsoft Operations Manager 2005. The platform monitoring subsystem is hosted on a Dell PowerEdge 2650 server.
The Evolution Benefits system also uses some of the advanced features of SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition. For example, the company uses SQL Server Reporting Services to generate ad-hoc reports for internal users, and a custom set of reports, viewable through a Web services-enabled Web page, for external users such as employers and third-party administrators. The company is implementing SQL Server Notification Services to automate event-based communications that currently are accomplished manually. Evolution Benefits also plans to deploy Analysis Services to facilitate online analytical processing.
The Active Directory® service in Windows Server plays a central role in providing authentication and role-based authorization. The Authorization Manager feature of Windows Server 2003 is used to extend role-based authorization to provide fine-grained, configurable role-based security across the deployment. Although the deployed system does not use Microsoft Windows SharePoint® Services, SharePoint was used as a collaboration point throughout the development process which involved up to 15 developers and numerous QA staff and analysts.
The 20-person team included 15 developers who worked approximately 700 developer weeks and created 33,000 lines of code to complete the project. The solution was created in 10 modules and uses 750 stored procedures and more than 1,000 classes. Web services are used in a number of places throughout the application, including generating follow-up letters, batch card status maintenance, and reporting. Inter-operation with external systems is done using BizTalk Server 2004. Integration between customers and partners is primarily accomplished through batch interfaces, using BizTalk Server 2004 to process both inbound and outbound batch files. Asynchronous processes for card maintenance use a Web service and BizTalk Server to interface with the processing engine.
Benefits
Evolution Benefits and its business partners are enjoying a number of benefits from the new solution, including a better view of their customers, the ability to increase customers without adding staff, 50 percent faster development, faster access to third-party data, and time saved with Reporting Services.
360-Degree View of the Customer
By unifying the three separate applications, sign-ons, and databases, the new system gives administrators a better view of the employer customer and their cardholder participants, which boosts productivity and efficiency while working with the data.
“Our new application brings all data together on a central SQL Server 2000 database, providing a 360-degree view of the customer,” says Paul Chabot, Vice President, IT, Evolution Benefits. “This makes it easier for employers and third-party administrators to better serve their Benny debit card users because they can resolve customer queries while they’re on the phone without having to make a call back. Customer service representatives used to have to log on to multiple systems and access data in multiple ways to answer questions. Now they can go to a single source. All the information they need is in one central location, that’s why we call it BennyCentral.”
IncreasedOperational Efficiency
The unified system, with its complete view of the customer, has helped Evolution Benefits more than double the number of Benny debit card holders it supports, without increasing its operations staff. The same efficiency the new solution brings to customers provides a productivity boost for the company’s internal operations.
“We provide second-level customer service support to our administrators, and our .NET–connected solution is helping us respond more quickly to customer queries,” says Deb Lembo, Vice President, Operations and Implementation at Evolution Benefits. “We are already handling phone calls to support a customer base that has more than doubled, and we are doing this without having to increase our operational staff because we can now give our healthplan partners and third-party administrators Web-based access to the information they need to answer their own questions. When they do call, for example if a card was declined at the point of purchase, our people have immediate access to the data they need to respond.”
The system has also helped the operational staff achieve a 90 percent reduction in new customer setup time. “With our new solution, based on .NET-connected technology, we’ve been able to slash that time to just one day,” says Lembo.
50 Percent Faster Development Time
From the outset, there was pressure on the Evolution Benefits development team to complete the new solution on time, which is one of the reasons the team decided to work with Visual Studio .NET 2003 and the .NET Framework and wanted to continue building on the Windows operating system and SQL Server 2000.
“We were able to cut our development time in half because of the productivity we gained from working with the Visual Studio development environment and the .NET Framework,” says Erwin. “Microsoft development tools lend themselves to rapid development far more than Java or any of the other technologies I’ve worked with.”
Erwin also likes working with SQL Server 2000. “I have experience with Oracle and with DB2, but SQL Server is by far the easiest database I’ve worked with,” Erwin says. “I find it much easier to access data from SQL Server than from Oracle or DB2, and the integration with the .NET Framework and Reporting Services is a huge benefit. SQL Server has made my life easier.”
“Working with Visual Studio, we created our new solution on time and within budget,” says Rick Bucchi, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Evolution Benefits. “And it has done everything we needed it to do. It’s a rarity when you can get exactly what you need—on time and within budget.”
Faster Access to Third-Party Data
An important element of the new Evolution Benefits solution is faster integration of data from a partner providing card processing services. Data from the card processing engine used to be imported nightly as a batch file, but Evolution Benefits wanted more frequent updates in order to provide its customers with more timely data.
“We achieve near real time data replication from the card processing engine by using two features of SQL Server 2000— native replication and log shipping,” says Chabot. “Every 15 to 20 minutes we get, in essence, a new snapshot of the entire card processing database. This helps us greatly enhance our customer support.”
Time Saved with Reporting Services
Reporting Services is providing a productivity boost to employers and third-party administrators using the Benny debit card. Reporting Services has provided an especially significant improvement in creating substantiation reports—a process in which the Evolution Benefits application flags card purchases that require validation as an eligible expense.
“Our previous system could only generate claim substantiation reports in batches of several hundred,” says Lembo. “This had the potential to hamper productivity for large administrator accounts. With Reporting Services we see no limits in report generation. What used to take half a day or more to do is now accomplished within 15 minutes. This is a huge benefit for our customers.”
The company also uses Reporting Services to generate more than 40 reports for internal as well as external use for its clients.
“We like working with Reporting Services because it is a great solution right out of the box,” says Michael Pelletier, Principal Consultant at Tallán. “Combined with the two-tiered security which relies on Active Directory and Authorization Manager, Reporting Services makes it easy to deliver rich reporting through a Web-based interface to give users the right access to the right reports, whenever the information is needed.”
Reporting Services currently runs reports against a replicated data store. In the near future the company plans to deploy Analysis Services, the online analytical processing (OLAP) component in SQL Server, and create a data warehouse with multidimensional cubes for data mining.
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