The SaaS Connection
Consistent data a key benefit of SaaS for Ohio P&C carrier.
Insurance Networking News, 06/01/2010
Much of the allure of software as a service (SaaS) lies in its ability to trim hardware and software costs and keep maintenance to a minimum. But for the Celina Insurance Group, there were other benefits that proved just as compelling.
Celina is a small P&C carrier ($83 million in premiums last year and 170 employees) headquartered in the western Ohio city of the same name. Four companies currently comprise the group: Celina Mutual, National Mutual, Miami Mutual and West Virginia Farmers. Its products include personal and commercial lines and farm insurance, and it sells some or all of its lines in Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Iowa and Minnesota. Organized as a mutual company, Celina has been managed by the same family since it was formed in 1914. It sells all of its lines through independent agents.
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When Celina began considering a SaaS provider for its data management needs, the company already had a strong, flexible data warehouse with robust analytics capability, says Celina's CIO, Rob Shoenfelt. The problem was, it was a little too flexible. "We gave the users carte blanche," he recalls. "You could drag this here, drag this into the columns, drag this into the rows. Well, they wouldn't do it. It was too hard; there were too many choices."
Another problem was that different departments didn't necessarily use the same processes or even the same data. "We grew up in silos," says Shoenfelt. "The farm department wouldn't talk to the personal lines department, which did not talk to the commercial lines department. So, it didn't necessarily follow that they'd do things the same way, down to the definition of what the loss ratio should be."
At the suggestion of Celina's actuarial department, Shoenfelt began exploring SaaS, and four years ago signed up with iPartners, an Alpharetta, Ga. provider of SaaS solutions for P&C insurers. The fact that iPartners was an insurance specialist weighed heavily in its favor, Shoenfelt says. "If you go to just a pure data warehousing place, then you have to teach them insurance. iPartners already knew all that, and they already had key performance indicators we could use. We didn't have to come up with our own."
Furthermore, iPartners was able to use data Celina was already pulling out of its back-end systems to put in its existing data warehouse, and that in turn eliminated many of the data integration issues that otherwise might have come with moving to a new system. "That was just huge for us," Shoenfelt comments. There have been some hardware and software savings as a result of moving to SaaS, but bigger savings came from cost-avoidance. Celina could have built everything it is licensing from iPartners, he notes, but it would have required a big investment of time and other resources that would have been hard to justify.
CONSISTENT DATA
Ted Wissman, Celina's VP, claims, found that even in his own department, not everyone was reading from the same page. Prior to moving to the iPartners platform, "we might have had some people relying on one piece of information and another individual relying on another piece of information." Part of the process of moving to a SaaS platform was revisiting existing reports and validating the assumptions that went into them.
"We actually found that the reports we had been relying on in the past were not telling us exactly what we thought they were telling us, Wissman says. "By going through the validation process, and then moving to the iPartners solution, we were actually able to improve our product. If we hadn't done this, we probably would have continued to rely on the old reports. There weren't any major issues with those reports, but there were little things we should have counted differently. We were able to refine everything."
Celina does business in storm country-tornadoes and thunderstorms blow through its territory often. When they do, Wissman's claims department uses iPartners' analytics to estimate the carrier's exposure and prepare its agents to handle the extra claims. "When a weather event goes through a certain area, we want to know what our exposure is in that area, and how we can be proactive in handling the claims we envision coming in from the event," Wissman says. By combining National Weather Service information with information from its data warehouse, the claims department can drill down and get a pretty good picture of what to expect in storm-affected areas.
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