Insurance Commission of Western Australia Uses Output Director to Simplify Printer Setup
Established in 1926 as a public entity providing workers' compensation insurance to miners in the goldfields of Kalgoorlie, the
Insurance Commission of Western Australia (ICWA) now employs nearly 400 people and offers a variety of policies, including coverage for over two million vehicles registered in Western Australia. In addition, ICWA manages insurance funds on behalf of the Government of Western Australia.
Complex Environments
To help streamline their financial processes, ICWA chose to implement Oracle Financials. They deployed this Oracle E-Business Suite module on a Linux system, with separate tiers for the application and database servers. Maintaining production, test, development, and sandbox environments resulted in a total server count of eight.
As ICWA neared a go-live date, they realized that setting up print functionality for their users would have meant defining each of ICWA’s fifty printers onto every server and maintaining these definitions as printers were changed or needed replacement.
“When we looked at our printers by server tier and by environment, we saw that we were looking at going through the setup process literally four-hundred times just to get started,” said Jeff Cook, Team Leader, Network Operations at Insurance Commission of Western Australia.
Equally troubling was that printing process from the end-user perspective would have become more complex than before the Oracle Financials implementation. “We did not want to go forward with something that would be unfriendly to our internal customers,” said Cook. “It was important to us that we did not take a retrograde step.”
