Case Study: New Era Life Insurance achieves up to 5x faster claims processing and streamlined development with OpenText Visual COBOL

Visual COBOL ushers in new age of modern application development

New Era Life Insurance, a Texas-based insurer, faced a growing challenge: its core claims system dated back to the 1980s and relied on proprietary mainframe technologies (CA-IDEAL/CA-Datacom), making it hard to find developers and to add modern functionality. Large programs (up to 50,000 LOC) and strict screen field limits forced staff to navigate many small screens, slowing claim processing and hindering ongoing enhancements.

Working with Micro Focus, New Era migrated to Visual COBOL for Visual Studio and COBOL Server, participating in enhancement and beta testing to remove field limits and modernize the stack. The result: single screens more than four times larger, simplified development and faster feature delivery, significantly faster compilation and debugging, and up to 5x faster batch processing (tens of thousands of claims processed in under an hour), supported by responsive vendor support.

New Era Life Insurance

Doug Nelson

Senior Systems Analyst