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Taiyo Life innovates with IBM Z Automatic Binary Optimizer

By JING CHEN posted Mon March 01, 2021 09:55 PM

  
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Taiyo Life Insurance, established in 1893 with over 120 years in the business, entrusts its IT services to T&D Information Systems. Unlike other major life insurance companies, Taiyo Life Insurance provides insurance for family members in each individual household through personalized consulting services. A sales representative visits the customer and designs an optimized insurance plan by identifying insufficient protections within the current insurance plan.

Enhancing customer experience
Taiyo Life Insurance updated their insurance contract supporting system in 2012 achieving completely paperless procedures. This enabled sales representatives to sign onto their mobile devices to complete applications of insurance contracts which, until then, had been done manually. Mobile devices were further enhanced in 2018 and are currently used as “Taiyo Life Concierges”. Taiyo Life Concierge enables sales representatives to respond to various requests from customers immediately through a variety of new features, delivering convenience for customers and an evolution of its services.

To realize the benefits of this innovative system, the IT infrastructure and tools supporting the core of the business require top performance. For a long time, Taiyo Life Insurance has relied on IBM Z, featuring high availability and processing performance, as a foundation for its core business applications.

Taiyo Life Insurance recently upgraded our production environment to IBM z14. This time, to realize the new features of Taiyo Life Concierge, we needed to optimize about 3,000 actuarial calculation modules using the IBM Automatic Binary Optimizer for z/OS(ABO).  These modules, which calculate insurance premiums, would then be able to take advantage of ABO performance and enhanced response time of Taiyo Life Concierge improvements on the IBM z14. The actuarial calculation modules were developed by T&D Information System using Enterprise COBOL V3R4. We decided to introduce ABO since the development period is limited and wanted to avoid the costs and complexities of re-compiling all the actuarial calculation modules using the latest COBOL compilers.

Unleashing the power of IBM Z with ABO
After initial testing, we applied IBM Automatic Binary Optimizer for z/OS to the 3,000 actuarial calculation modules. As a result, we obtained about a 20 percent CPU time reduction on z14. This greatly improved the response time of Taiyo Life Concierge for our customers, and was better than our expectations.

By using ABO and IBM z14, we have improved the efficiency of resources used in the production environment, and enhanced delivery of services to our clients through improved response time.

We anticipate continued performance improvement for scalability through the evolution of the IBM Z architecture in conjunction with ABO.


To learn more about IBM Automatic Binary Optimizer for z/OS, contact your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner.
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