Migration from J2EE to ASP.NET Web Services and Win Forms - Large Corporate Wide Business Reporting Application

Automating various paper-driven processes and internal operations. Professional on-demand as well as scheduled reports for various business needs.

The Challenge

• The insurance industry is a heavily paper-driven industry - involving a wide variety of forms, applications and paper-based products.
• With insurance data spread across various databases and various time periods - it became a challenge to retrieve certain specific business centric data - such as monthly total claims, annual premiums etc.
• Reports would need to be created ad-hoc - by a super-user - who could ideally pick and choose the database fields that were needed on the new report - and could also schedule the execution of the report.

The Solution

• Corporate-wide reporting 
  Leveraging .NET's built-in support for Crystal Reports, ANUJ Technologies helped build a highly customizable reporting application. The actual implementation consisted of creating customized 'report creation' forms which let an end-user input specific 'report parameters' and their corresponding values (e.g. start date, end date). These parameters were used to dynamically set values on a pre-defined template (crystal report) - which was then executed against a Crystal Engine. The result-set returned by the execution was provided in various formats including acrobat, excel - or (optionally) directly sent to a printer.
• Automation of paper-driven processes 
  Each 'paper-centric' use case was analyzed with the objective of automating it - using a web-centric solution. The end-user would be required to simply initiate each process via a website - which would also provide electronic versions of documents - as well as document specific artifacts (e.g. electronic signatures etc.) Using .NET SOAP - a series of web-services was designed based on the set of use cases.
• Automated Testing 
  A comprehensive NUnit test suite was developed for testing each webservice - and its internal business logic. Future changes and feature requests on existing webservices could be fairly quickly implemented and tested.
• Automated Builds and Deployments 
  Production releases were built using an automated build process involving picking up checked-in source files, modifying environment specific configuration files and building all project components.