Insurance Giant Desjardins Saves $10 Million with Cincom® VisualWorks® Upgrade
As part of a $1.4 billion organization, Desjardins General Insurance Group (DGIG) has been in business for over sixty years and has over four thousand employees serving 1.6 million customers in Quebec, Ontario, and Alberta. They have one of the highest customer-service ratings in the industry, so naturally, they wanted to ensure their competitive edge. Desjardins has been using Smalltalk since 1998. When their Claims Application needed an upgrade, they called Cincom Professional Services.
Headquartered in the United States, Cincom Systems is an international organization with offices around the world including Canada. According to Jacques Maltais, Desjardins Director of Development and Implementation for Claims and Enterprises, “Cincom’s expertise and knowledge of the system were the most important elements of why we contacted Cincom Professional Services to do the upgrade.”
The conversion was better—much quicker—than we anticipated.Charles Brochu, Desjardins Technical Project Leader
Combining Desjardins’ knowledge of the claims application with Cincom’s knowledge of VisualWorks, the upgrade team was able to quickly and efficiently analyze the upgrade, move the code to the version control system and get the application running correctly on the new version of VisualWorks. Team communication was accomplished by telephone, e-mail and regularly scheduled meetings.
According to Charles Brochu, Desjardins Technical Project Leader,
“Telephone calls were efficient and pleasant, and any variances were quickly corrected by the Cincom consultant.”
After the upgrade was complete, Cincom trained Desjardins’ developers on the new version of VisualWorks. “The Cincom consultant was rigorous and efficient in responding to questions, and the training material was well presented,” said Brochu.
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