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Swift Proposals Earn Gains

Bob Mueller September 2007

This is the third in a series of INNovators Award Winners.

Technology acquisition in insurance companies usually goes something like this: A department sees a need to improve its processes. Someone from the department hunkers down with IT to hammer out a list of requirements for a system that will fill the need. Committees are formed to find systems that meet those requirements, they create a short list of possible systems, and vendors are called to show off their products.

At Mutual of Omaha, things work a little differently. About a decade ago, the Omaha, Neb.-based insurer formed its Strategic Technology Development Division. "It's a matrixed organization," says George Royce, the vice president who heads the division. "There's a project team that includes project managers. There are engineering resources. And we partner with the different units that are in either individual financial services or group benefit services."

Often, the division's projects are driven by needs identified by Mutual of Omaha "business partners"—the company's business units. But sometimes the solution is identified first. "Some of our projects are driven by a monitoring tool we call the technology opportunity index," Royce explains. "It's a process of looking at a technology and deciding when it might be right for us." When the technology looks ripe, Royce's division runs a pilot and matches the technology to the company's business requirements.

A few years ago, xPression, a suite of content management tools from Document Sciences, Carlsbad, Calif., made it onto the index and began looking like a promising technology. There were a number of potential applications for xPression and strategic technology development after a pilot implementation deemed it ready for use.

Priorities for new technologies are "driven to a great extent by our business partners," Royce says. "We suggest those technologies, but they are looking for systems that can make a major difference with a business problem that they're trying to solve." Mutual of Omaha's group sales department had just such a problem.

PUTTING THEORY INTO PRACTICE

The sales department decided it was time to reengineer its entire sales process. One part of the redesign was the way individual salespeople wrote proposals. The existing system involved Microsoft Word documents, along with some complicated Word macros.

A typical proposal might take two or three days to create, start to finish. "This was very cumbersome and very labor-intensive," Royce recalls. "The macros were hard to manage and maintain, and the skill set required to maintain these complex macros-tied in with Excel and other desktop tools-was becoming a real problem for the end users."

XPression looked like a good solution to the sales department's problem. "We were very pleased with some other rule-driven systems that we had been using, and we were impressed with the xPression technology, since it seemed to follow that same pattern of being rule- and data-driven." Further, the xPression suite incorporated up-to-date standards, such as Web Services, XML and J2EE, while some competing products did not.

Royce and his business counterpart sponsored the project, aided by a group of project managers and an IT manager. Members of Document Sciences' professional services team, the firm's IT outsourcing subsidiary, helped with the implementation, and an outside consultant helped with content and look and feel.

With xPression as the core technology, the team used the suite's APIs to build a Web-based system that gives its group sales people, located in 26 different offices, access to central, pre-approved proposal content. At the same time, it leaves them with flexibility to personalize proposals for individual prospects. The proposals can be printed locally by the sales people, or centrally in batch mode at the home office.

MEETING CHALLENGES

Implementation took about eight months and, though there were some challenges along the way, Information Services Manager Jody Kriegler shrugs them off as the usual hitches that show up with new deployments. "This was the very first time we'd ever had any exposure to xPression," she says. "We had some difficulty integrating our system with xPression, and with user interface development. Some of that was new to us. We had a few challenges from the standpoint of being able to rearrange the text, but we worked through them. We received support from Document Sciences in that regard.

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