This month: Millville Mutual Insurance Companys AlbertCreveling

BY G. BARRY KLEIN, CPCU, CLU

This technology executive is a textbook example of the saying,If you want it done right, do it yourselfsince for many years, hehad no choice.

Once upon a time, the U.S. insurance landscape literally wasblanketed with a large number of small local insurance companies.Fewer today, smaller carriersfor example, Millville MutualInsurance Company, located in northeastern

Pennsylvaniastill hold their own, mostly as mutual insurancecompanies owned by their policyholders. They tend to prosper by athorough understanding of their specific marketplaces and givingexcellent service to their agents (and, through them, to theirpolicyholders).

That level of service doesnt come easy, though, particularlysince running the IT shop of a smaller carrier poses a biggerchallengestaff, or the lack thereof, to handle the same kinds ofpolicy processing, imaging, general ledger, claims, and othersystems at work at larger organizations.

We actually doubled our IT staff in 2004, says Albert Creveling,head of technology at Millville Mutual. I hired an assistant. Untilhis assistant came on board to do RPG programming and miscellaneousPC support, Creveling had been doing it all himself, and Millvilleuses almost all internally written and supported systems with oneexceptionits ImageRight system.

Our primary policy processing system was started on an IBMSystem34 and finished on a System36, although today we run it on anAS400, he explains. Much of it has been rewritten, but partscontinue to run in System36 emulation mode. Creveling filled 12years ago the position then held by Millvilles current treasurer,John Kitchenthe author of the original system. It was nice to beable to go up to the guy who wrote the original system, if I hadquestions, when I didnt know the system as well as I do now.

Creveling graduated from Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvaniawith a degree in business administration. His career began as acomputer operator for a local bank, and then he moved over toBechtel, a large international construction firm, for six years,where he was transferred to different locations in various statesbefore returning to take a position with a resort in the Poconos.The next stop was Millville.

The insurer writes mostly personal lines, staying away fromauto, and is growing steadily in small commercial. Its customerbase now is up to almost 60,000 policyholders, yet it operates withonly 24 employees, including claims adjusters (two of whom areremote).

Not all of Millvilles systems are internally written, however.Our president, Paige Raski, came across some financial calculatorson the Web and figured if a company could write something thatcomplex, it certainly could handle our rating disks, Crevelingsays. The company, Pine Grove Software, wrote the softwareMillvilles agents use to rate and order homeowners, mobilehomeowners, and dwelling fire policies. After the policies arerated in the agents office, the information is transferred toMillville electronically. The application and images, such asphotos of the property, go directly into the ImageRight system, andthe data goes into our policy processing system. If the underwriterapproves the application, it is simply a keystroke to issue thepolicy, he adds.

Millville outsourced its BOP rating software to EZ-Rater, whichhas worked very well, Creveling says, and now is taking delivery ofa new system for farm- owners rating, also from EZ-Rater.

Since Millville Mutual writes a lot of property insurance, ithas contracted with a Dallas firm, InsVista, to send out itslienholder notices. InsVista consolidates these notices for variouscarriers and sends out some electronically and others by mail. Thefirm provides the service for less than Millville would pay forpostage alone, according to Creveling. InsVista makes money, and wesave money, he affirms.

For Creveling, delegating may not be a big option, but he makesthe most of what hes got.