Below is the seventh of 13 Novarica Research Council Impact Award nominee case studies that INN is presenting, in no particular order. The awards, which will be presented at the research and advisory firm’s October 30th event in New York, honor best practices in insurance industry IT initiatives and strategy.
A large multi-line commercial property/casualty insurer (chose to remain anonymous) wanted to replace its inflexible and costly legacy policy administration systems with a modern configurable system with rules management capabilities and a developed integration architecture to quickly launch new products and/or offer bundled product offerings.
The insurer used iterative prototyping within the new system to gather and confirm product rules and user interface (UI) requirements. The insurer ran into a problem when it presented the proposed agent UI to a group of its agents. The feedback indicated a major overhaul was required, but the configurability of the core product enabled the carrier to achieve this within four weeks.
One hundred members of the IT staff, eight vendor-provided consultants and additional service providers participated in the five-year project. Business users developed the business requirements, and a cross-functional steering committee made up of representatives from underwriting, product, IT, finance and operations governed the project. Status reviews occurred bi-weekly with monthly reports to senior management covering progress, burn rates, issues and risk mitigation.
Since its first lines of business went live in 2008, the insurer has improved efficiency by 25 percent and achieved a straight-through processing percentage of 75 percent for BOP accounts. The company has also improved accuracy of location-related information by 25 percent.
To see coverage of the other Novarica's Impact Award nominees,
Check back Tuesday to find out how American Safety undertook an initiative to consolidate all underwriting units across the company into a single system.
About the awards: Novarica’s first annual Research Council Impact Awards honor best practices in insurance industry IT initiatives and strategy. Nominees were selected across four categories—Practice, Quick Hit, Transformation and Expansion—with three nominees chosen for each (a tie in the Expansion category meant four nominees were selected). The nominees were selected by a committee from a collection of case studies drafted by Novarica from submissions by insurers.
The nominating committee included CIOs Andy Wood (Wilton Re), Dan Simpson (Trustmark), Eric Bulis (SBLI USA), Larry Fortin (Millers Mutual Group), Mark Berthiaume (Chubb), Pete Moreau (Amica), Piyush Singh (Great American Insurance Company), Reuben Broadfoot (LifeMap), Sal Abano (Tower Insurance), Stuart Tainsky (PURE) and Tim Billow (ING).
Winners will be determined by votes from the more-than-300 members of the Novarica Research Council, a moderated knowledge-sharing community of insurer CIOs and senior IT executives.
The nominees and winners will be recognized at the
