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Pulling the Strings That Control Data

Pat Speer November 2006

When it employees at Cincinnati-based Great American Insurance Co. got wind late last year that their new CIO would be Piyush Sing, former CIO of the Peoria, Ill., multi-line P&C carrier RLI Systems, they probably took a deep breath-rightly assuming that big changes would be coming in how the company uses technology to conduct its specialty commercial lines business. Sing's reputation for building front-end technology to match his previous company's unique requirements (RLI's motto was to provide "Fundamentally Sound Innovation" to the insurance industry) preceded him.

As expected, Sing came to Great American Insurance with a similar plan, and a vision to overhaul the 130-year-old company's front-end applications for insurance processing with a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web services approach. Especially critical to Sing's vision: the ability to manage the appointments, interactions and state-by-state compliance requirements of a U.S. distribution network comprised of 8,000 active agents.

Managing agent appointments and associated regulatory reporting is a challenge for any carrier, but especially so for Great American Insurance, which seeks to garner and maintain robust business relationships with independent agents who sell the company's specialty property and transportation lines, specialty casualty lines and specialty financial products.

While most licenses require company or agency appointment by each respective state's regulatory body, the variations in how these state-by-state reporting requirements are conducted add to the challenge.

Jeff Yates, executive director, Agents Council for Technology for the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America, Alexandria, Va., admits that both agencies and insurance companies do not like the inefficiency of the current state process, "but they are focused on addressing the issue with the state regulators and trying to get more efficiencies from the states."

BROADER ISSUES

And while it may be a given that grassroots efforts will continue, companies such as Great American Insurance face an uphill battle that is broader than simply meeting and anticipating agent appointment requirements.

So with both efficiency and accountability in mind, Great American Insurance examined its legacy systems (mainframes running COBOL, DB2 and Internet Connection Sharing technologies) and its associated applications, some of which were used strictly for agency appointments. Organized as a management company with a portfolio approach to systems and services, Great American Insurance also had business units that had created their own relationship management applications connected to a database. These one-off applications provided various business teams with the ability to conduct long-term planning with producers, create individual marketing plans and perform competitive analysis.

"We knew we needed something that would better facilitate agency appointment processing and compliance requirements, and at the same time offer a tool to our business units and underwriters to improve management of our independent agents," says Cary Cain, manager of Great American Insurance's producer relationship project.

As Great American Insurance evaluated potential solutions, the carrier also took into account its longer-term goal-to allow its agencies access to improved customer self-service.

A host of vendors came forward, many offering off-the-shelf packages that could be configured via custom code to accommodate some of Great American Insurance's requirements.

"We require configurability," admits Cain, "but with an open, flexible architecture so that maintenance isn't an issue for us."

FRAMEWORK APPROACH

Ultimately, the company teamed with PlanetSoft, an Aliso Viejo, Calif., provider of process management framework technologies and back-end systems for the insurance industry. Four full-time team members and Great American Insurance's end users worked with the PlanetSoft offshore development team to define the carrier's requirements. After an eight-week collaboration process, the PlanetSoft team headed to India to create the technology framework for which Great American Insurance will be able to customize its broader plan to adopt a new agency management platform.

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