Moose International

BACKGROUND
Headquartered in Mooseheart, Illinois, the order of the Moose was founded in 1888 and is a nonsectarian, nonprofit organization that serves over 1.5 million members globally. Among its charities is Mooseheart, a campus for needy families and Moosehaven, a home for the elderly.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Moose International’s risk management department ran a legacy application for claims and claim processing, provider communication and calculations, and insurance invoicing for members. Given the age of the software, it was not surprising, but no less frustrating for Moose employees, that it could not integrate with email, provide document storage or offer flexible reporting capabilities. Over the past few years, two attempts were made to move to packaged software systems, but both failed to meet the needs of the risk management team.

Moose was seeking a solution that would be easy to implement, supply the necessary functionality and map to their existing process flow to reduce training issues and ensure adoption. The ideal solution would meet the functionality requirements, improve productivity and have an intuitive and easy-to-use interface. The solution would need to securely protect the member and organization information.

SOLUTION
Moose engaged SWC to develop a Microsoft® .NET Windows-based solution using Microsoft SQL Server for data storage. To accelerate the custom development process, SWC employed their proprietary development framework, Catalyst. Catalyst enables .NET applications to be developed rapidly and with extreme accuracy.

Because historical data was so important to the department and the application, SWC needed to extract and migrate all of the legacy data to SQL. Because quick user adoption was critical, the main user interface screens were designed to take advantage of the new environment but held similar conventions. This eased transition from the legacy system to the new system. SWC worked closely with senior executive staff at Moose, including Director of Risk Management Brad Costello, to create, develop and deploy the new application.

RESULTS
With the deployment of the new application, Moose’s risk management department now enjoys a new fully integrated software system that manages the needs for all of the department’s functions including email integration, advanced document storage and retrieval abilities with improved reporting capabilities. This new application will assist the Moose International risk management department to greatly accelerate report creation, to better manage their historical and future data and to provide more accurate financials. Mr. Costello reports that with the new system the time required to generate accurate and comprehensive financial statements has collapsed from an entire day to just a few minutes.

...back