What happens when the people who designed your home brewed rating system no longer work for your company and the system is broken down a good portion of the week?

Thats the situation the Workers Compensation Rating and Inspection Bureau (WCRIB) of Massachusetts found itself in.
Our system was becoming outdated and it was difficult to find programmers to service it, said Paul Meagher, president of the private, non-profit rating organization licensed by the state; WCRIB collects policy, claims, and financial data from all carriers licensed to sell workers compensation insurance in Massachusetts.

Faced with this problem, WCRIB contacted similar organizations in other states and finally met with the American Cooperative Council on Compensation Technology (ACCCT), a consortium of independent workers comp advisory and rating organizations covering Minnesota, Wisconsin, and North Carolina.

Through software developer Intelligent Information Systems (IIS), the organizations developed Spectrum to support their internal operations with each organization running an independent version of the system.

Early in 2000, the WCRIB began a four-month review process. It looked at the expense of redesigning the old system, outsourcing to a larger vendor, or, finally, joining the other rating organizations with Spectrum. In the end, Our governing committee felt it was best to go with Spectrum, Meagher said.
Members of the WCRIB team spent several days in Minneapolis getting hands-on experience with the system and saw that it worked efficiently and performed the tasks it said it would perform.

We tried once to reinvent the wheel and we werent successful, Meagher said of the botched homemade system. We decided to go with a proven thing this time.

It took six months for IIS to customize the system to WCRIBs needs. Each state has different procedures on data collection, rate making, and assigning risk. It took another four months to complete the installation and get everyone up and running.
What amazed the WCRIB is that the system was productive in virtually every area on the first day it went live. There are still some small bugs, but the major things were taken care of, Meagher said. The people here are smiling. They are able to produce reports on that same day instead of waiting for batch processing to be done overnight.

WCRIB customers have also found that their needs are being met in minutes or even seconds rather than in days. For the agencys governing committee, there were other important reasons to be excited about Spectrum. To see a project come in on time and on budget is unheard of, Meagher said.

Productivity has never been higher. While the old system was down once every six days, the new system has yet to crash for as long as a day in the year that it has been active.

Meagher is a great believer in the collaborationand in IIS. Youve got to expect some bugs in a major installation such as this, but IIS jumps at [the problems] right away and finds the answer, he said. The four bureaus now using Spectrum share in the investment and also in improving the product over time. Meagher thinks that other ratings organizations might join in as well.

With such a specialized service, it can sometimes be difficult to find a software service that is both productive and affordable. Sharing information has helped make Spectrum productive. Sharing ownership has helped make it affordable. ROBERT REGIS HYLE

THE PROBLEM: AN OUTDATED RATING SYSTEM WITH LITTLE REMAINING SUPPORT

THE COMPANY: WORKERS COMPENSATION RATING
AND INSPECTION BUREAU OF MASSACHUSETTS
LINES: WORKERS COMP
POLICIES IN FORCE: 140,000
WEB SITE: www.wcribma.org

THE SOFTWARE: SPECTRUM, FROM THE AMERICAN
COOPERATIVE COUNCIL ON COMPENSATION
TECHNOLOGY AND INTELLIGENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS
WEB SITES: www.accct.org AND www.renewal-iis.com

Special Reports /

WCRIB (MA) and ACCCT/IIS

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