CROP INSURANCE QUOTING

WEB APPLICATION PROJECT

MSCG LLCA STORY BY

JESSE R MUNRO

FOR ISM 3004 COURSE

THE PROBLEM:MSCG LLC (owned by the author of this story) was retained several years ago by a large crop insurance agency to assist it with “quoting” insurance costs to its customers.

Crop insurance is a unique product in the insurance industry for a number of reasons. The USDA sets the rates using massive amounts of agricultural statistics, and agents must use this information to help farmers determine how much their insurance will cost for the year.

Or, they can use tools made available to them…

THE PROBLEM:What you have just seen is Premium Calc, made available to crop insurance agents by the USDA to help calculate how much insurance will cost for a farmer.

The problem? We just calculated a SINGLE line of insurance.

A medium-sized policy could have 50 or more lines, each of which must be calculated separately.

The publicly-available tools were not good enough for our customer. A new approach was needed…

GENESISOur first approach, to get the customer immediate relief, was to put all of the actuarial data into a spreadsheet.

With so much data involved, the sheet could only quote one line at a time, but the user could use it much more quickly than the USDA website shown earlier.

EVOLVINGWith more time, we were able to write a multithreaded Windows application with a user interface designed to quickly enter quote lines, and distribute it with the actuarial information in a relational database.

Multithreading was a major improvement. The software could now calculate quotes faster than the user could input lines into the software.

EVOLVINGActuarial data changes VERY frequently. The end result was to create a support nightmare. Agents were now chained to their specific computer.

A few laptop thefts resulted in massive (though encrypted) data loss.

CONNECTINGThe customer invested in Windows Terminal Services, and we adapted the application to ensure it would operate in that environment with simultaneous users.

We also added additional functionality, making the quoter import information from other USDA software and tools to free users from data entry tasks.

UNSHACKLEDUsers were now even more productive, and could be so while not in the office or tied to their specific computer— provided they had access and sufficient rights to a Windows-based computer to run the Terminal Services client.

THE HOLY GRAILThe ubiquity of the web drove USDA’s decision to release their quoting tool as a web application in 2000. At the time, the Web 2.0 technologies which drive today’s interactive, responsive web sites were in their infancy.

By 2010, these technologies have matured, allowing web pages to request new information without refreshing the page for 5-20 seconds or longer.

The ultimate quoting tool would be web-based yet as fast and responsive as the multithreaded desktop application.

A HITCH…Only one problem remained. Web servers typically do not have the capability of launching background processes that page scripts can monitor and access statefully.

With each line on a quote requiring as many as eight database queries to varying tables to make a calculation, interactivity grinds to a halt, as the page would have to recalculate the quote inside the script process.

100 Lines on Quote

X 8 Database Trips

X 50 milliseconds per trip

40,000 millisecondsper page

40 SECONDS

SOLVEDWe created a custom Windows service and moved all the quoting logic and database interaction into it, allowing the service to cache quote data and actuarial numbers in memory instead of having to rely on database trips.

The web site scripts simply communicate with this new service instead of the database server, marrying Web 2.0 technology with n-Tier architecture.

SOLVEDThe user is able to edit the lines on the quote and send them to the server, as would be expected from an application in the Web 2.0 era.

The custom Windows service recalculates the entire quote between user requests, keeping results in memory until the browser requests them.

To the user, this appears to happen in real time like a desktop app. To demonstrate…

SUMMARYThe web site user was able to enter six lines on a quote, change calculation settings 20 times, and then produce a “multilevel” quote requiring nearly 100 calculations, in nearly the same time the USDA-provided solution required to enter a single line and perform a single calculation.

The server handled all the math and actuarial data required in apparent real time.