Broker Network Data Migration for Willis Commercial Network

The Willis Networks are thriving partnerships between independent UK insurance brokers, the Willis Group and a panel of leading insurers. The Willis Commercial Network members are Independent General Insurance Brokers that handle predominantly Commercial lines business.

Originally all members of the Willis Commercial Network used the Grapevine software system. During 2002 the strategic decision was made by SSP to migrate all Willis brokers from Grapevine Software to a brand new system called Insight, which was based on an Oracle database.

There were around 80 Willis brokers and the plan was to migrate at the rate of one to two brokers per week. So the requirement was to build a robust Migration Module which could be re-used quickly and easily for each site.

Due to the nature of the data on Grapevine the module would have to profile the insurers and risk classes for each site, then allow the migration consultant to configure the mapping tables for that particular migration. The data involved was a mix of Commercial & Personal Lines, Clients, Policies, Risk details and Claims details. We also migrated large amounts of Policy Schedules and general documents which were held in MS Word format. This involved developing a Module which would load each schedule into MS Word, merge the data from the Grapevine system, attach a new MS Word template, then save the document as an Insight document.