Benefit Development Group

By Phil Winkler, President, PLM Consulting, inc.

Benefit Development Group (BDG) manages employee benefits for a number of companies in the Southeastern United States. This process involves entering and maintaining data on each employee, their dependents, etc. The monthly processing involves the calculation of a premium for each employee, for each coverage they may have. This calculation varies by coverage, but is entirely data-driven by incorporating all the business rules necessary in appropriate tables in the application.

Holland Powell, CEO of BDG, originally managed the data with DataEase version 4.5, but wanted a Windows database. He contracted with an Access developer to create a new database, but after 2 years of development and a few thousand dollars realized the project was a failure. He contacted us at PLM to assist.

We received a copy of the Access database for analysis and saw immediately that the problem was one of not being normalized. In three days we re-wrote the database in version 5.15 and returned it to him where he used it daily for several years.

In 2001 he inquired about DataEase for Windows and we informed him we could convert his app to 5.5.. The business reasons were several. His staff was spending an inordinate amount of time faxing premium statements back and forth to various companies who would make additions or deletions to the statement for newly hired employees, terminated employees, coverage changes, etc. Holland wanted a database that could either fax or email a premium notice directly from the database and have a more familiar Windows graphical user interface (GUI).

Additionally, he noted that temporary employees had a difficult time coming up to speed with the DOS version and its use of function key combinations, inability to use windows printers, etc., etc. As he said, everybody expects a Windows interface nowadays and I t disagree with him so we began the migration to DataEase 5.5. (Version 6.1, the current version, has since been applied)

The migration process involved creating data exports from 5.16 and corresponding data imports in 5.5. This provided us the ability to perform parallel testing as development progressed. Fortunately, since PLM had created the DFD application it was already fully normalized and used proper naming conventions for forms and fields.

Holland Powell: "I have never used a product in my business that can incorporate new requirements as quickly as DataEase. s service has a lot to do with that, too."

Here is the cardinality or structure of the application and a few business rules.

• We manage many Companies.
• Each Company may have 1 or many Locations (branches)
• Each Company may have 1 or many Plans (coverages)
• Each Plan may have 1 or many types (Self, dependent, single, married, etc.)
• Each Plan has a business rule for calculating the premium.
• Each Location may have one or many Plans chosen from those available from the Company.
• Each Location may have 1 or many Employees.
• Each Employee may have 0 or many Dependents.
• Each Employee may have 0 or many Plans chosen from those available for the Employee's Location.

Summary
DataEase 6 provides a feature rich development platform to rapidly migrate your legacy DataEase for DOS application to the Windows environment. More information about DataEase is available at: PLM Consulting, Inc., The DataEase Forum, and, of course, Sapphire.