TrustMark to Quantech Conversion

[Guest PamGanyo]

Would a former Trustmark client be willing to share their conversion experience and present level of satisfaction with Quantech? Specifically, anything you'd do differently if you had it to do again? ease of the conversion? time frame from time the decision was made to the day you went live on Quantech? training and support from the folks at Corbel? Thanks.

[Guest Tom Makeever]

Pam:

If you don't get a reply, please feel free to call John Latson at (800) 326-7235 ext. 1100 and he'll put you in touch with your Quantech sales rep, who in turn, can give you a list of firms and contact names of TrustMark users who have gone through the complete conversion process to Quantech. I appreciate your desire to speak to someone who's gone through the process and get the good, the bad, and the ugly right from the source. We're happy to help facilitate this discussion.

Thanks,

Tom T. Makeever

VP Sales, Corbel

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[Guest JohnB10]

Pam:

We've been using Quantech for about a year and a half for traditional (non-daily) processing. Recently we took over a block of business that was processed on Trustmark. Although there was an official Trustmark to Quantech conversion process available at the time, we discovered we could convert the plans ourselves a bit faster with a tool called "Monarch". Monarch is "Report Mining" software sold by "Datawatch". Very generally, the process goes like this:

(1) Print a couple of reports to file from the Trustmark system. One report should contain "synoptic" data (using Trustmark lingo), the other should contain account data.

(2) Open up the files in Monarch. Monarch allows you to "Paint a template" over the report and then export the data from the report into a flat text file (I highly recommend comma separated files).

If your Trustmark reports are the same format for each plan, you can use the same Monarch template for each plan.

(3) In Quantech, import the files from step two using the "DER" and "TIR" features (DER for synoptic, TIR for account data).

Bottom line is that the conversion will take an investment of time, whichever way you do it.

As for our experience with Quantech, we are generally happy with the system. If you'd like to hear about some of the "Gotch-ya's" we've discovered, by all means send me an e-mail or call me.

Good luck!

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[Guest PamGanyo]

Thanks for the response, Tom. We do expect to get a list of references from our rep when we meet in a couple of weeks. We were looking to see what type of insight we might be able to get via this source in the meantime.

Also, JohnB10, thanks for your information. We are looking to convert both daily and traditional to Quantech. I appreciate the information on the Monarch conversion option for our traditional plans.

[Guest]

Just saw your inquiry re: TrustMark to QT

conversion. We wrote our own programs for VLM conversion and also wrote Datair to QT conversion programs because we have used all 3 systems. Conversion from GUPTA to Oracle was no picnic! A few things were left out of the equation - tremendous crash 2 months later. But we survived.

Feel free to contact me at skipm@horizonbenefits.com

I was looking for any comments about ver 5.0

which I just received after several calls

to QT. Don't think much of installing to my

workstations (we have 12 users)especially if

it takes 1 to 2 hrs each.

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[Guest]

Skip:

re: conversion to 5.0

we loaded 5.0 early on, and the document was not as clear about some things as it could have been. hopefully it is clearer now, and I may be simply repeating things.

any customized reports you have created have to be set to oracle before converting

if you are using vesting % on any reports, these reports will have to be reset after conversion.

vesting no longer shows up in plan specs, it is in a table 'outside'. therefore, if you could have used a pre-defined vesting table and didn't, the system will create a new table for you = plan ID. when we were Beta testers for 5.0 we ended up with around 100 vesting tables, many = 2/20, so it wasn't pretty. I would set as many as you can before converting. there is a program on our website under custom reports (4.0) called planvst. it searches database for all plans in which predefined vesting table = none.

you go into crystal, open the report, run 'refresh' and go from there. website is LDA-FCPA.com

no guarantees offered on any reports out there, but they seem to work most of the time. (the SOA reports were not written for 'share' accounting, so the grand totals for gains sometimes doesn't make sense)

[Guest John McCrary]

I used to be a TrustMark user (5 years on the daily system). I have converted several plans from TrustMark to Qunatech. I didn't seem to have any problems, of course I didn't do it on a large scale. If you write a TBOL program to download the info from TrustMark into a flat file (text file) and then inport the data into Quantech through the DER program, I can't see a big problem. Once the programs are established, it should flow well. Let me know if you have any questions - jmccrary@lda-fcpa.com.

Good Luck!