Finding Faults Faster Perks up Productivity, Eliminates Downtime

Like many businesses, GuideOne knows the importance of keeping their mission-critical applications up and running. GuideOne's IT group must maintain the performance and availability of applications for commercial and consumer policies, and claims. Reducing the number of abends on these vital applications is a very high priority.

GuideOne has been in the insurance business since 1947, when it began offering nondrinkers lower auto insurance rates. Headquartered in West Des Moines, Iowa, GuideOne has since become the largest insurer of churches in the U.S., and offers a variety of commercial and personal insurance products through its 2,000 independent and career agents.

Two key philosophies have made GuideOne the successful insurance company it is today: a commitment to social responsibility and a dedication to serving customers in select niche markets. And their success in serving customers is due, in great part, to the quality and performance of GuideOne's applications for commercial and personal insurance, and claims.

"Those are the three mission-critical systems that we're focusing on, in order to reduce the number of abends," explained Mike Uding, systems programmer at GuideOne.

"Each application in those systems is vital for writing policies, gathering client information, paying claims. Our goal is not to let abends affect business during our core hours, or even during off hours. If we can reduce the number of abends dramatically, the through-put for those applications should be a lot greater."

	Fault Manager has helped us with quicker problem resolution and helps eliminate down time. It's wonderful that we are notified of a problem right away and can fix it quickly, before users start calling the help desk 20 minutes later when they're frustrated. —Mike Uding, Systems Programmer, GuideOne

GuideOne's IT team had two more issues to contend with: service level agreements that required specific levels of availability, and increasing development of web applications connecting to their main applications. "We're starting to develop more applications on our web site, so that customers can go and look up their policy information," explained Uding. "Our service level agreements have changed to reflect this, because this level of availability means that if those back-end systems aren't available, there's an even more visible impact to the business. If we're going to make these applications available 24x7, we don't want to have transaction abends at 3 o'clock in the morning when most people are home asleep."

To that end, the IT team began three years ago to find ways to measure, report on and reduce the number of abends their applications were experiencing. "We have a follow-up process from the time a batch fault is reported through to the time we fix it," said Uding. "A team evaluates this information every month and determines whether the fix we found was permanent or not—but we didn't have the same capability on the CICS side. There was no way we could monitor or report on how many transaction abends we were encountering. That's when we began looking at Fault Manager."

GuideOne is now using Fault Manager to obtain real-time and historical reporting information on their CICS transactions, and to automatically notify key personnel of problems before they impact the business.

"Fault Manager has helped us with quicker problem resolution and helps eliminate down time. It's wonderful that we are notified of a problem right away and can fix it quickly, before users start calling the help desk 20 minutes later when they're frustrated."

An End to Guesswork

Uding is already noticing great benefit from Fault Manager—just by wearing his pager, or reading his e-mail. "Since we installed Fault Manager, it's allowed us to find out about CICS region problems long before our help desk begins getting calls about it from users. Our pagers are hooked-up to receive detailed information from Fault Manager on all CICS regions, and I get e-mail reports on all our systems. With the early notifications we get from Fault Manager, we can get out and solve the transaction problem, quite quickly. Fault Manager has really sped up the resolution of these problems."

Uding finds Fault Manager's ability to deliver detailed information on each abend a considerable time-saver. "We tell Fault Manager what information we want to see in the notification. When a production problem occurs, Fault Manager notifies us with the specific information required to correct the problem. That information has proved to be vital in speeding up the resolution process.

John Christensen, technical support manager, is even more impressed with the quality of data Fault Manager delivers. "When business users call in to our help desk, they may or may not know the abend code or what program has the problem. If you rely on Fault Manager, however, there's no guessing factor, and we don't waste a lot of time just trying to find the problem. It gives us an unbelievable amount of information. All the data we need is automatically delivered to us—we don't have to sit and try to second-guess what kind of abend we're dealing with. It's just phenomenal."

Installing Fault Manager wasn't an issue for the IS team at GuideOne—its easy installation was a major plus. "There wasn't a whole lot of time spent on installing Fault Manager," said Uding. "The process is so easy that there's not much time spent installing the product—you've got reporting at your fingertips right away."

Fault Manager's ability to create customized reports is another valued feature for Uding. "The reporting ability is very solid. We have a wall downstairs where we post all of our reports and graphs from Fault Manager. These show how we're doing with response times, and we're beginning to roll these out on our intranet. Graphs are sometimes more informative than an e-mail report; they really show us what's going on and where we have the most frequent problems."

In the final analysis, even the best software can be hampered by poor service or support. As far as Christensen is concerned, that's not a problem with Fault Manager—or Compuware. "I think the support from Compuware has been outstanding. Whenever we had an issue, which wasn't often, our Compuware support person would be here working with us, and made sure our questions were answered. It really sped up our implementation."