PIAL Case Study

Founded in 1888, the client is a private, non-profit association made up of all insurance companies licensed to write property coverage within Louisiana. Focused on maintaining a competitive property insurance market, it needed a robust database system to process rate applications for its 500+ members.

CHALLENGE

PIAL needed to upgrade its rate application property inspection database, a custom application developed by a third-party vendor who no longer was engaged with the company. Because of the age of the custom application and its older development technology, the client faced several challenges that prevented updating the system:  Limited IT resources  No experience with development or database technologies to make coding changes or updates  No documentation on the custom developed system

SOLUTION

With years of expertise and best practices around custom developed applications, Sparkhound was chosen to provide necessary ad-hoc support and development needs including:  Served as an extension to the client’s IT team by delivering application user maintenance and managing application issues  Debugged and fixed system errors around SQL, .NET and SMTP Mail for continued performance  Developed an infrastructure documentation plan to ensure IT staff could mitigate future maintenance issues and limit downtime

IMPACT

By utilizing Sparkhound’s expertise, the client was able to focus on strategic business initiatives instead of hiring and training IT staff to support a custom technology, resulting in significant cost savings. In addition, Sparkhound’s response time to enhancement needs and maintenance issues has greatly reduced downtime, creating an improved user experience.