EAI follow-up: Piecing it all together

Computerworld - A year after Steve Kaufman and his staff at Goshen, Ind.-based health care insurer Mennonite Mutual Aid Association (MMAA) launched a massive enterprise application integration (EAI) project (see story), the results are in, and the news is mostly good.
The company's goal was to use tools from Vitria Technology Inc. in Sunnyvale, Calif., to integrate core insurance applications running on IBM AS/400s with applications running on Windows NT servers and to more than double its system-to-system interfaces over the next five years.
The project is being driven by the approach of the October 2003 deadline associated with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), which requires the use of a set of specific standards for the electronic exchange of data.
"We finished our first project in August of last year, the HIPAA 834 group enrollment transaction, and now we're working on the most complicated transaction," says Kaufman, MMAA's director of IT architecture. That's the 837/835 transaction, in which MMAA receives a health claim from a provider and then tells the provider how it's going to pay the claim. This is also the transaction with the highest volume.

Steve Kaufman of Mennonite Mutual Aid Association (MMAA)

MMAA has also completed an interface from a Windows NT SQL Server database to an AS/400 DB2 database, connecting the company's two main databases.
On the downside, initial plans to double the number of system-to-system interfaces have been slowed. "Our organization had plans for CRM, and those were cut back quite a bit with the whole economic situation, so that's going to slow down how many interfaces we put in," Kaufman explains.
Remaining Attractive
Another EAI user, Corporate Express Inc., an office supplies distributor in Broomfield, Colo., has improved customer service by almost doubling the number of interfaces to business partners, from 120 to more than 200. Its aim was to cut costs both internally and for its customers so it would remain attractive as a preferred supplier.

	Andy Miller of Corporate Express

The company has also completed a handful of other EAI projects in the past year, including integrating its PeopleSoft ERP system and its warehouse management system.
"The integration effort is probably even more successful than we planned," says Andy Miller, vice president of technical architecture at Corporate Express. "We didn't think that we would replace as many legacy interfaces as we did. We actually went back to quite a few older interfaces between applications and retrofitted them."
One of the results was that the company set a new record for online