Some thirty-plus presentations are scheduled for theindustry-wide Real Time Day, Wednesday, Feb. 29. The day,spearheaded by the Real Time/Download Campaign, coincides with LeapDay, and will offer agents, brokers, carriers, vendors and otherspracticalguidance on how modern workflows can help drive business andprofits growth.

An opening session, featuring agency principal Stu Durland,co-chair of the Real Time/Download Campaign, which organized andpromoted the day, will offer an introduction to efficient workflowsand set the stage for the rest of the day.

Durland will broadcast live fromthe ACORD studios inPearl River,NY. Other live sessions willaddress agency, carrier and vendor issues, along with a review offindings from the recent Agency Real Time Survey of more than 3,100agents and brokers.

Presentations will take place throughout the day both from thestudio and in webinars hosted by the campaign, carriers, vendors,users groups and others across the country. In addition to manysessions focused on agents and brokers, a noon webinar, led byagent Cyndy Smith, of Haylor Freyer Coon, and EMC InsuranceCompanies' Teresa Addy, will focus on carrier and vendorimplementations.

More than a dozen agency-focused sessions—most broadcastlive—will be put on by technology vendors, includingAgentDirectExpress & RealTimeExpress, Applied Systems, SEMCATand Vertafore, which will co-host sessions with its users group,NetVU. These webinars will explain how agents and brokers can makebetter use of technology available within their systems to growtheir business and boost efficiency.

Carriers can learn from these sessions how technology can helpthe agents that represent them. Insurance companies can also tunein to webinars hosted by NxTech and IVANS that will help themunderstand how to align their systems with the needs of agents andbrokers.

A number of carriers, including Cincinnati Financial, CNA, EMCInsurance Companies, Harleysville Group, Progressive, SelectiveInsurance and Westfield Insurance, will also host webinars duringReal Time Day. At these sessions, insurance companies will explainhow their technology works with management systems to deliverbetter agency-carrier interface.

Sessions hosted by agency management systems users groupsASCnet, NASPA, NetVU and NUDGMI will help member agencies andbrokerages learn how to get the most from their systems, as theywork to increase revenue, profits and customer servicefunctionality and, at the same time, reduce operating costs andworkflow inefficiencies.