What’s New: In brief (July 10, 2006)

Crawford Adjusters Canada recently appointed John Taylor to the position of vice president, human resources and training. Taylor began his career as an independent insurance adjuster at Crawford after graduating from Wilfrid Laurier University’s Bachelor of Business Administration program in 1986. He worked as an all lines adjuster in the firm’s Guelph branch upon graduation and was appointed branch manager in 1995. In 2000,Taylor worked in Ottawa as part of the project team establishing the Hepatitis C Class Action Administration Centre, and acted as project manager of the Walkerton compensation plan class action settlement agreement. Taylor, who has been part of Crawford’s professional development team since 1995, is a fellow chartered insurance professional (FCIP), a certified human resource professional (CHRP) and holds a certificate in adult education from St Francis Xavier University. “John’s commitment to continuing education for clients and employees alike is an incredible asset to Crawford,” John Sharoun, chief executive officer, says. “John is uniquely qualified to add great value to this important initiative having worked as a field adjuster and a branch manager before taking on additional head office responsibilities which have led him to this human resources role.”

BluePhoenix Solutions (NASDAQ: BPHX) is currently developing a multi-million dollar platform and database migration project for Canadian property and casualty insurer Desjardins General Insurance Group (DGIG). The project will provide Desjardins with an improved technological infrastructure that will increase the speed and quality of its insurance consulting capabilities, thus increasing profitability. “The purpose of this project is to provide DGIG with an infrastructure that will allow us to better streamline the insurance services provided by our team of over 1,000 insurance agents and subsidiaries,” Pierre Deschenes, senior executive vice president Information Technology at DGIG, says. “We have chosen BluePhoenix because their automated tools and proven methodology can provide an almost seamless transition to the new platforms and technology. This will also allow us to concentrate on the business needs of our clients and significantly reduce our IT operating costs.” The project involves migrating DGIG’s current COBOL/IDMS applications to a Windows/COBOL (Fujitsu NetCOBOL) and Unix/Oracle platform environment. This will enable DGIG to operate a more standard IT environment, suited to its current insurance applications. BluePhoenix Solutions will deliver the migration using the BluePhoenix IT Discovery and BluePhoenixPlatformMigrator tools. BluePhoenix is using several tools for the various stages of the implementation. The BluePhoenix IT Discovery product is used to perform an enterprise-level assessment of the interaction between COBOL software components, and IDMS schemas and databases. The BluePhoenix PlatformMigrator solution performs the program, database, and environment migration.