In today's world of instant gratification, waiting 30 days for apolicy to be issued is no way for an insurance carrier to dobusiness. CNA Canada knew this and Lynne Von Wistinghausen, vicepresident of operations and information technology and her team sawto it that something was done.

"The specific challenge was our broker turnaround time to issuepolicies faster and pull data out of a system in order to havebetter information and become more efficient," she says. "We neededto free up capacity within our company so we could reallocate ourresources to higher-valued work."

Commercial fleet for CNA Canada was processed manually, whichwas fine when the carrier began that line of business, but theproduct's success caused more problems.

"When we started this product line it was very small and wasn'tworth putting automation into it, but as it started to grow weended up putting more bodies into processing the line of business,"she says. "By the time the underwriting department finished bindinga policy it was 30 days later."

The carrier couldn't hire enough bodies to keep up with thedemand, according to Von Wistinghausen.

"Nothing was captured when it came to the difference between ourbook rate and our market rate," she says. "It was allExcel-spreadsheet based. We couldn't pull information and report onour profitability properly when it came to rate and retention forthe commercial auto line."

The carrier employs a homegrown administration system for itsother lines of business and Von Wistinghausen didn't believe addingthe commercial auto line to the legacy system was a viablesolution. Building their own solution for the commercial auto linewas not considered a good use of resources, either.

"We wanted to get out of the software development business andfocus more on insurance," says Von Wistinghausen. "When you developsomething from scratch you end up having to do way moremaintenance."

CNA Canada looked at a number of commercial software vendors,but none on the initial list had a solution that the carrier feltwas a good fit, according to Von Wistinghausen.

"They could do one thing well, but not other things," she says."Plus, the prices they were charging were out of our ROI."

In a second look through policy system vendors, CNA Canada cameacross MajescoMastek and its STG Policy Administration system.

"They are very responsive and customer oriented," says VonWistinghausen. "They started their system in the commercial autobusiness, so they had a good framework. Plus, the businessfunctionality was there."

Counting the initial lack of success in finding a vendor, ittook about 18 months for CNA Canada to finally selectMajescoMastek. From there, it took just 10 months to get thesolution on line in March of this year.

Many of the issues in the process involved Canadianspecifications and the carriers are regulated in operating a fleetbusiness inCanada.

"We entered into a contract to develop the commercial Canadianaspect of the solution, so that was developed on top of whatMajescoMastek already had in a cloud-hosted environment," says VonWistinghausen. "They do everything. We bought a license and paidfor the customization."

The STG solution has the ability to communicate with CNACanada's homegrown solution, so there are integration points thatafford the carrier a national view of their policiesacrossCanada.

As the project progressed, the carrier determined thatconversion of the existing policies was a key issue.

"We wanted to be live as soon as possible because it took us solong just to find a vendor," says Von Wistinghausen. "We initiallyhoped to be live with something by the fall of 2011, but werealized that was going to be impossible."

Typically, it takes a full year for insurers to gain anybenefits from a new system if it is introduced into production on arenewal-only basis, according to Von Wistinghausen.

"We wanted to get the ROI going, so when we went live on March5, MajescoMastek and our IT team did a one-time data dump of thehighest level of information," she says. "We hired two contractresources to spend three months putting in all our policies. We'reat the point now where we have policy data through the month ofNovember, so we're getting the business value right away."

Von Wistinghausen believes in the adage: no pain, no gain. Sheknows, though, that it is less painful going through the transitionthan it would be to stay with the old workflow.

The benefits have been quick. By late May, Von Wistinghausen hadalready moved two staffers to more high value-added work that ishelping the carrier's brokers to process work faster.

"We've gained the efficiency we were looking for," she says.

A second painful area involves the change in behavior among thebusiness users because the company changed its business processesfrom start to finish.

"It takes time to get people up and running," says VonWistinghausen. "There were pockets of user issues."

The new policy system allows CNA Canada to provide a betterservice to its brokers and expand its business without having toadd resources.

"Before, in order to expand we had to add people," says VonWistinghausen. "Now we can expand without having to add resourceson the back end to do administrative work. Instead of adding peoplewho can type fast, we can add people who can help make us moremoney, which is exactly where you want to put them."