Principal Financial Group, an insurance company and investment experts, is constantly working on improving customer service applications. For this reason, they had the need to standardize the generation of information capture forms from different systems, where each of these used its own logic, with its own diagramming and graphic design.
Due to the aforementioned, and given the evolutionary maintenance processes of the existing forms, various problems were caused, such as:
- In the first place, difficulty when modifying a form.
- In addition, difficulty in applying massive modifications to the forms, for example, adapting to a new corporate image.
- Finally, duplication of efforts, since the launch of each new form implied a new development.
For this reason, Tecnova implemented the “Corporate Forms Administration System”, a single and centralized tool that allows the generation of forms that are flexible enough to adapt to the needs of the different development platforms available at Principal. Consequently, the developed system considered the following fundamental aspects:
- Design and implementation of a centralized database of forms.
- A template administration website.
- Obtaining centralized data.
- Services that allow the creation, updating, visualization of forms.
- Service that allows you to retrieve PDF documents generated from a base64 form.
Evolution of the System
As a result of a period of exploitation, it was shown that the potential of the system could be much greater, and the implementation of the “Forms Simplifier” system was implemented, a complement that functions as an intermediary between the applications and the Corporate Forms System. which allows:
- First, generate a form and immediately obtain the resulting PDF in one step.
- And, create forms without having to enter all the fields of it. Many uses of forms, by different systems, do not require that values be set for all fields, this added greater flexibility to the solution.
In this way, each application can interact more freely with the broker, using its own variables and necessary fields. The intermediary handles the different needs of each application and delivers all the necessary information to the Corporate Forms System.
