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A Back Office Blueprint Spurs Front Office Growth

Pat Speer May 1, 2008

A new architecture and associated document management solution is streamlining enrollment at Unum Group.

Kevin McCarthy, president of U.S. Unum, was happy to share $13.7 million in bonuses with its Chattanooga, Tenn., workforce as part of a $44.5 million companywide dole out in March. “All of this activity around pricing, discipline, underwriting disciplines and business mix management has led to some fairly dramatic improvements in our loss ratios,” McCarthy told attendees at a recent Accredited Investment Fiduciary Analyst meeting in Naples, Fla.

But if you ask John Harris, one of Unum’s systems consultants, he’d tell you he’d like to think that it may have had something to do with an enterprise-wide initiative called “Simply Unum.” The Simply Unum project is delivering the technology possible to streamline enrollment for its 100,000 customers, and offering 28,000 product options and services with self-service components.

Marking its 160th year in business, U.S. Unum is part of Unum Group, a $10.5 billion company that employs 10,000 in the United States and U.K., and provides disability, long term care, life and voluntary insurance to more than 21 million individuals and their families.

Competing with the likes of Aetna, Mutual of Omaha, Wachovia and even U.S. Bank, Unum has been on a fast track since 2003, launching new products and services in all of its businesses.

As part of that growth initiative, Unum’s IT team was already tasked with devising a new architectural strategy when the directive came to devise a way to give its administrators, benefit managers and human resource professionals what they need to better engage, retain and maintain their business.

“We sat with the business unit heads and came up with the Simply Unum tag line to describe what we hoped to accomplish, a new approach that makes it easier to do business with us,” Harris says.


John Harris

Leveraging its service-oriented architecture (SOA) foundation, the enterprisewide approach started with a review of the company’s some 100 disparate systems.

“We experienced a lot of merger and acquisition (M&A) activities over the years, and the systems in place reflected a variety of document generation systems, some developed in house, some developed for the mainframe,” Harris says. “None of them were as flexible as they could be.”

And because Unum’s data was at the mercy of its many systems, the challenge, adds Harris, was to find a solution that would work with logical data models not just for the Simply Unum project, but throughout the enterprise.

SEEKING A SINGLE PLATFORM

The Unum meeting between IT and its business brought to light the desire to focus on document-related processes that could improve employee productivity and create a positive customer experience. Further, the goal was to find a solution that could provide a single technology platform that would comprise an automated path—from personalized benefit package designs, to quoting, to enrollment, to ongoing billing and administration.

Unum is not alone in its quest to streamline the customer experience. According to an Insurance Networking News’ reader focus group held in November, 2007, finding the right mix of personalized communications and focusing on leveraging technologies that will positively impact the front office were among participants’ significant interests.

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