Different locations, with different regulations and systems in place. Their desire: move to a single system platform and scale cost effective operational hubs.

Our customer, a 3.3 billion dollar company in GPW, pursued a growth strategy based on achieving systems and operational efficiency. The strategy was defined to be completed in three phases and is expected to bring a 125% of growth in GPW in the next five years with a 47% ROI and an increase in productivity of 40%.

The strategy once executed and completed would help the territory to transform the way they do business and realize additional efficiencies and benefits. The territories would free up resources to focus on Marketing, Product Deployment and Relationship with Brokers and Agents.

The company:

Our customer, a 3.3 billion dollar company in GPW, has more than 17 million clients and markets a full range of property-casualty products to both consumer and commercial clients. It has a clear strategic focus across all lines of business that it writes, with a special emphasis on personal accident, warranty, personal property and financial lines.

The need:

The customer was seeking for a solution to:
	Provide them with enough flexibility to support different products and regulations. Deliver standardized support to the business along different locations. Reduce time to market. Increase efficiency. Administrate corporate reporting and compliance.

They needed a vendor that could provide them with a common systems platform with global reach and local delivery. Insurance understanding and on site services were determinant.

The objectives:

	Phase I: Have different locations working with a common systems platform. Phase II: Implement a HUB processing unit to service different locations in order to:
		consolidate processes and functions, maintain and support the common systems platform in a centralized site,
	Phase III: Consolidate business for all locations and regulations in one single system.

The strategy - A three phase approach:

We identified, along with our customer, a number of areas opportunities to work with:

Bottlenecks and unbalanced work distribution. Lack of standardized processes. Manual Work. Excessive handoffs and checkpoints. Front-desk function not well defined. Business Model not implemented consistently. Lack of meaningful operations metrics. Systems not used to full potential. Lack of synergy within the company. Inconsistent Customer Service across locations. Wide range of business knowledge and employee skill.

The strategy was to create a large operations site, leveraging the IT and Operations structures and capabilities, which will provide services to brokers, customers, prospects and internal clients (Profit Center Managers) of these territories. To accomplish this strategy we worked in a three phase approach.

The first phase, already operational, involved the implementation of our solution, an end-to-end client server solution, with an initial investment of almost 7 million dollars and almost 3 million dollars yearly for licenses, maintenance and services with our company.

In this first step we unified in a common systems platform all their lines of business and products. It was a distributed implementation in 10 different locations providing local services and support to the business independently of the specific regulations.

The solution covers PAS, billing, claims, reinsurance, accounting, general ledger, and reporting. This phase also included web access capabilities to their agents and integration.

The second phase involved moving those systems and the underwriting operations into a hub that would act as a platform to concentrate the operation and consolidate processes and functions, such as data center operations, technical support of applications, policy coding, quotes, policy issuance, renewals and endorsements. The first hub involved the centralization of half of their locations and a team of 200 people to run the Hub.

Analysis of current processes and capacity in each location. Gather pertinent financial and operational information. Design new processes and identify technology enhancements. Develop a Should Be Model for the HUB.

The hub would provide economies of scale related to the system, the hardware and communications as shared services and enabled the use of specialized resources with specific business or IT skills to leverage the local operations: for example they would have access to a specialized underwriting team, being able to streamline all the business using standard processes and in the same efficient way as all the organization.

The customer worked with us in at least 193 processes that were identified and the impact in the system reviewed, in order to have a single point of entry, standardized processes and a single platform to operate.

The hub provided them with the capability to achieve high quality service, which included redundancy in communications, in systems operations and was the base for the next phase: migrate to a single system that could administrate their different locations, products and regulations.

The third phase, in progress, consists in a successive roll out of our new end to end solution within the hub instead of a big bang approach. As the operation is in order and controlled there is no need to rush change.

The solution is a .net, web enabled and SOA solution that comprise PAS, billing, claims, reinsurance, accounting, general ledger, and reporting as well as agent access and integration.

First we are rolling out the PAS functionality which will be integrated with the existing systems in the hub with an estimated additional investment of almost 4.5 million dollars.

We will continue replacing the rest of the functionality gradually and while the transition is in effect, we will use our integration capabilities to maintain and assure information streamline within the systems.

Integration services provided by our company enable the carrier to seamless integrate with agents into their systems or simply automate underwriting from a paper form, using OCR and XML.

As part of the entire 3 phase’s strategy we provide requirement definitions, implementation, data migration, training, quality assurance, development of specific requirements, post production support and outsourcing.