THE BEST agents and brokers know that continuous investment in technology is simply a cost of doing business. Of course, the same holds true for automation vendors, who must constantly improve their systems' capabilities if they are to get and keep clients who are always on the lookout for a technological edge.

To help readers evaluate the latest products and system enhancements, we recently contacted 10 major vendors of agency management systems for retail agents and brokers. Following are some highlights of their current systems and anticipated offerings.

Agency Software
(www.agencysoftware.com)

Helping agencies maintain control of their data when using insurance carrier Web sites is the prime benefit of Agency Software's newest product, EZAgent for Windows, according to Agency Software president Mitch McInelly.

“Carriers that have not adopted such standards as XML or Transformation Station–especially smaller carriers–are asking agencies to go to the carrier Web site and input client information there,” McInelly said. “Besides moving away from a SEMCI approach and leading to multiple entries with different carriers, this puts the client data solely in the hands of the carrier.

“Our new product allows agencies to both upload and download their data in this situation,” McInelly explained. “Agencies can use EZAgent to take the data from a carrier Web site and download it into their agency management system. They can also take data already in their system and upload it directly into a carrier Web site.”

McInelly said the new software has been adapted for agents writing for Farmers Insurance Group and that the company has begun the mapping of several other carrier Web sites. “Our goal is to have 20 more carrier sites mapped by the end of the year,” he said.

McInelly said the new product is available as an optional feature on AgencyPro, the company's agency management system, which is available as an in-house product or an ASP-based model. AgencyPro is available for an upfront price of $2,500 for 1-5 users and a $500 charge for each additional user. Tech support for the system is free for the first year and $750 annually after that for up to five users. Additional users are charged an additional $200 per year each. The EZAgent program sells for $595 for a two-user license, with a $25 per-month tech support fee, he said. System requirements for AgencyPro include a Pentium processor, an Internet connection with Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 or 5.0 and Microsoft's Windows 95, 98 NT or XP Pro operating system.

AMS Services
(www.ams-services.com)

A new real-time comparative rating system and upgrades to its newest agency management system were among the developments at AMS Services in the past year. AMS introduced the comparative-rating program SETWrite in mid-2004, and later released the first in-house version–version 1.5–of AMS 360, its latest agency management system. They have since released new enhancements in version 1.6, with version 1.7 due out in a few months. The system is targeted to middle-market-sized agencies.

“We've made a number of enhancements to the workflow and accounting system of AMS 360,” said Michael Krassner, director, field sales, AMS. “The system can now better handle more complex needs than it could before, such as multiple agency entities and remote locations.” Krassner added that through a new program called new program release (NPR), current AfW customers can migrate to AMS 360 automatically. “That now becomes their upgrade path,” he explained. “NPR essentially takes the entire database from AfW and moves it to AMS 360 automatically, keeping the data intact.”

Krassner said the latest version of AMS 360 is also more user-definable. “Each person using the system can define the interface to better suit how he or she works,” he stated. “For instance, a claims person can configure the system to have a particular look when it starts, which can be different from the look configured by a CSR or an accounting person. Each one would see different things when opening the same file.” Krassner said AMS can make enhancements to AMS 360 directly through the Internet.

AMS has also made enhancements to TransactNOW, its real-time transaction tool, Krassner said. “We've added new business quote request capability for both personal and commercial lines,” he said. “We've also added drag-and-drop capability directly into client files, for a variety of attachment types.” He described another new feature, global change for personnel: “For example, if a producer leaves, the agency can reassign all of their accounts to a new producer automatically, without having to update each account individually.”

Krassner said AMS has also recently released version 4.5 of Prime, its system for small agencies, and version 6.0 of Sagitta, its system for agencies with several hundred users. “We've made a number of enhancements to Sagitta,” he said, “including a workflow manager, a client relationship manager, and changes to the user interface and navigation that allow us to export reports in XML format.”

Applied Systems
(www.appliedsystems.com)

An increase in the number of available real-time transactions and greater integration capabilities are among the enhancements Applied Systems has focused on in the past year, according to Jeff Purdy, senior vice president and national sales manager. The current versions of Applied's agency management systems, The Agency Manager 7.2 and The Vision Series 3.2, are each available as either an online, ASP-based model or as an in-house version. Purdy said that the Vision Series is used by agencies of various sizes but is intended for those operations with particularly complex needs.

“We have over 70 insurance carriers who have now signed agreements for using Transformation Station for real-time transactions,” Purdy said. “This includes transactions that support inquiry, issuance, bridging and alert transactions, and we've worked to improve the workflows to increase the speed of these transactions.”

Purdy said Applied has worked to respond to the needs of an increasingly online clientele, as well. “With both our agency management systems in the past year, I would estimate that 65% to 70% of our new sales have been for the online version of the systems,” he stated. In particular, he explained that Applied has improved the ability of its online systems to facilitate a paperless office environment. “Getting the paperless environment to work (through an ASP) can be complex,” he said, “especially when you're implementing document management across the Internet to an online data center.” As an example of this improvement, Purdy said Applied has better integrated Microsoft Outlook with its systems, streamlining the process of attaching e-mails from Outlook into either the TAM or Visions system.

Another part of providing greater integration is Applied Connexion, which Purdy described as a tool set that allows users to integrate and move data to and from other software applications. He said approximately 100 organizations currently use the tool set, which is purchased independently of the management systems.

“Connexion functions as 'middleware,' that allows data to be sent from our system to a third-party product or Web site,” he said. “For example, many agencies develop their own Web sites, which they use to perform such functions as collecting sales and marketing information. Connexion would allow them to integrate that Web-site data directly into their TAM or Vision management system.” Citing the example of a large agency with other, independent computer systems, Purdy said the Connexion tool will also extract data from TAM or Vision and send it to the agencies' other proprietary systems using XML data streams.

Purdy said Connexion is also used by vendors wanting to integrate their products with Applied's systems. “For example, premium finance companies and document management companies have both licensed Connexion, to build an interface with our systems,” he stated. “When they develop those interfaces, we deploy the product jointly to our mutual customers.”

With the online version of the systems, Mr. Purdy said, no particular Microsoft desktop operating system is required, since Applied hosts the application on its servers. He said the needed connection speed could vary, depending on the size of an agency, but that a dedicated Internet connection such as DSL or cable would almost certainly be necessary.

DORIS
(www.dorissystems.com)

Michael Mansperger, vice president and chief information officer of DORIS Systems, says much of the company's work in the past 12 months has been to address the needs of their growing online client base.

DORIS has over 2,000 users of its two agency management systems: Agent's Choice, the in-house version, and Fileserver Online, the online, ASP-based model. Mansperger said that since more than 90% of new sales in the past year have been the online version, DORIS has been focused on “matching the two products feature-for-feature.” Both products are aimed at small to midsize agencies.

“With Agent's Choice, the ability to attach a wide variety of files has been virtually unlimited,” Mansperger said. “This has been somewhat limited in the past with Fileserver. For agencies that wanted to go paper-less–doing a lot of scanning and imaging–ASP-based systems have faced a number of issues, such as how to get the attachment to the server, store it there, and protect it,” he explained. “We've reached that point now, where our ASP version can accept about 20 times more types of attachments than it did before.”

Mansperger said that the effort to accept more file attachments with Fileserver brought additional benefits: “In developing the ability to accept attachments, we moved to a bigger, faster data center,” he stated. “This has increased both the speed and security of all online transactions. Also, where once we had a limited storage capacity for our ASP clients, this improvement now gives Fileserver users an unlimited storage capability.”

Another enhancement to the Fileserver system that Mansperger described is an increase in real-time activity through Transformation Station. “We are continually adding more insurance companies to our Transformation Station list,” he said. “We support all the inquiry transactions, and we're currently working on the quoting and issuing transactions.”

For carriers that haven't started using Transformation Station yet, Mansperger said, DORIS has expanded the use of its “Bridget” product. “Bridget allows real-time transactions between our system and carrier Web sites,” he said. “It passes the credentials to a carrier Web site, sends information to the carrier out of our database, navigates to the area of the carrier Web site related to the agent's inquiry and brings up the appropriate screen.”

With the newest versions of its systems (scheduled to be released this month), Mansperger said DORIS is focusing on commercial lines. “We have had commercial-download capability for 10 years,” he said, “and we have been waiting for carriers to become more active in this area. We are now introducing commercial download, with Progressive, and we've enhanced commercial-lines forms integration as well. For example, we can now handle up to 120 vehicles on a commercial-auto policy.”

Mansperger said that agents using the Agent's Choice system should have a Windows 98 or more recent operating system, which he explained also determines other system requirements. “I typically explain that by noting that if an agency's computer can handle the requirements of Windows 98, they will also support our system,” he said. He added that the system will function on either a peer-to-peer network or a regular domain.

Ebix
(www.ebix.com)

Graham Prior, senior vice president of agency management systems, explained that in 2000 Ebix (formerly know as Delphi) released a new-generation agency management system called ebix-ASP. Since then, he said, the company has continuously upgraded and enhanced that product.

Ebix-ASP is an Internet-enabled application that operates in a true browser-type environment, he said. It was developed using MS active server pages and the MS SQL server relational database.

New functionality is integrated with a number of rating vendors. Ebix also is releasing enhanced functionality to support commercial-lines download for a range of carriers and products, and is completing the integration of ebix-ASP with Ivans Transformation Station.

“The most exciting thing we've done is integrate the ebix-ASP application with ACORD's online WYSIWYG forms,” said Prior. “Agents will soon be able to pull up an ACORD form for each line of business that they serve, key data into those forms, and watch as the data automatically populate the ebix-ASP database through XML updates. We think that's quite a step forward in terms of ease of use for agents.”

Ebix-ASP is sold as both a hosted system (clients pay for the service on a monthly basis) and a self-hosted system (installed on an agency's hardware and run in-house on its own system). Pricing varies with the type of system a client chooses, the number of users, etc.

GBS
(www.gbsinc.com)

In the past year, says Jeff Seale, GBS vice president of sales and marketing, the company has focused on several enhancements to its Agency Expert agency management system: greater carrier download capability, an advanced version of the online system and improved remote access. The company offers four versions of Agency Expert-The MGA version, The General Agency version, The Standard version and the Agent Partner version–and has over 17,000 users.

“We have continually kept up with changes necessary for download in all lines of insurance,” Seale said. “But lately, we have especially focused on enhancing our system so that it accepts download in multiple formats-AL3, XML, ACORD standards, anything through IVANS, comma-delimited or text formats, for example. This saves time for the carriers, because they don't have to work with us to create a proprietary standard, and it makes things more convenient for agents, because they can request information from a carrier without having to worry whether they have the right capability.”

Seale explained that the setup of GBS' online products differs from that of an ASP-based model. “The first versions of ASP-based systems were basically just stripped-down versions of various companies' in-house systems,” he said. “Since many agencies lacked high-speed Internet access, these lower-functioning ASP models were an attempt to deliver online access to databases that moved with any speed. So if an in-house system had 100 possible fields, the online version might only have 10. We developed our systems to run using Windows Terminal Services, and we give agencies the full-bore system, with all the functionality of our in-house system.”

The increasing prevalence of high-speed Internet access has increased the possibilities for remote access as well, Seale said. “The availability of programs like Windows Terminal Services or PC Anywhere allows agencies to run their desktop GBS system from any Internet-connected remote location, with as much speed as if they were running it in their main office.”

Seale said the price for the systems starts with an initial cost that ranges from $495 to $795, and includes an annual fee of $150 to $250. A variety of additional modules can be purchased through the company's Web site, he said, all but one selling for less than $500.

InStar Corp.
(www.instar.com)

According to C. Thomas Hatcher, AAI, vice president, InStar has not only has added new features and improved functionality, but it also has worked closely with customers and user groups to implement workflow efficiencies designed to increase users' productivity.

InStar's StarAccess allows real-time inquiries with a right-button click through IVANS Transformation Station. Hatcher said in the next release, agencies will be able to do quoting for auto insurance in real time. Commercial-lines download is now available, and InStar has certified over 100 companies.

In the meantime, InStar has added a powerful word merge engine, enabling agencies to create template documents and forms that are easily available within the application.

In addition, the vendor has developed for its MGA customers a generic policy issuance module that allows them to set up and manage their own policy issuance programs without extensive custom programming.

“We also have enhanced our reporting features, ability to export data to Excel and two-way personal-lines rating capabilities,” noted Hatcher. “We have several new strategic partner integrations, such as premium finance real-time quotes with Premium Finance Specialists and FinancePro. “InStar Imaging, powered by DocStar, provides state-of-the-art technology integrated into our application and adapts to specific agency workflow to create a truly paperless office.”

The contact module has been expanded to handle multiple individuals with an unlimited number of addresses, phone numbers and e-mail addresses. (This is available for insureds, companies, vendors, and producers.) Specific modules are offered for agencies with niche marine, equine, aviation and bonding business, and users also will notice enhancements to the life and health module.

A new training CD guides users through all aspects of the software, and a variety of other e-learning options focus on the workflow integration of the software, he said.

InStar can be purchased through traditional licensing or a low monthly subscription fee. The software can be run on a local or wide-area network or hosted and accessed through the Internet.

QuickFile Agency Management System
(www.QuickFile.net)

“The most exciting new feature we've introduced during the past year is an online version of our QuickFile program called the Enterprise edition,” says Erik Finstad, QuickFile regional sales manager. “It's an easy and inexpensive way to store client data in one central location on the Internet, allowing agents to access it from wherever they may be. The data is secure and constantly backed up”

“The new edition is compatible with all major operating systems,” Finstad added, “and system requirements are minimal. When a new client purchases the program, we send an installation CD for the initial set-up, along with a printed user manual. A QuickFile specialist then contacts the client for unlimited one-on-one training. All program updates are included and can be downloaded directly from the QuickFile web site.”

Each year, QuickFile releases several new versions that contain new features and enhancements. Most of changes are customer-driven, and features are added in response to users' suggestions. For the past two years, QuickFile has focused on continued integration with carriers via company downloads, and Finstad is pleased with the results.

The initial cost of the regular version of QuickFile starts at $599 per year, per office. That includes the cost of the program, unlimited technical support and customer service, training and updates. There are no monthly maintenance fees.

Strategic Insurance Software Inc.
(www.sisware.com)

Strategic Insurance Software recently released an update for its Partner 6.1 agency management system. Mark Miller, SIS chief operating officer, said this update includes a new MapQuest feature that enables agents to get driving directions and maps to their clients' locations using addresses already stored in Partner. It also features two more additions to the WebLink component that facilitates real-time transactions with carriers' sites. Progressive's Drive insurance was added, along with Arbella Insurance Group in Massachusetts, which went live on May 1. Arbella uses JAVA scripting for WebLink, and Drive's implementation uses ACORD XML and Web Services. The other carriers available on WebLink-State Auto, Celina, Grange, Integrity Mutual, EMC and Ohio Casualty-use encrypted DLLs.

“We are wrapping up development of our next generation product. Partner XE is scheduled for beta in the latter part of 2005,” said Miller, “and will be previewed through a series of Web events that will provide a brief overview of the system.”

SIS also introduced Print Service and Data Service. Miller explained that, using .NET and Adobe technology, the Print Service provides a universal printing solution for all ACORD forms, company-specific applications and supplemental pages. The services are available as COM objects or Web Services, according to Miller, and pricing is based on the scope of each project, the number of forms used and the states in which they're used.

XDimensional Technologies
(www.xdti.com)

Bob Juracka, president of XDimensional Technologies, reports the recent release of several new features to the Nexsure agency management system, such as broadened integration with Microsoft Office Suite, including Microsoft Outlook. The vendor also made enhancements to its accounting system to better accommodate some sophisticated types of billings, such as those used by large organizations. One such feature, called list-billing, allows a master policy premium to be broken out among many potential sub-pieces of that account or related accounts.

Another major development is the introduction of Nexsure Instant Collaboration, a tool for accelerating and completing collaborative tasks. It allows someone outside an agency, such as a client, to take part in a step of a workflow that requires the insured's participation-verifying which certificate holders need to be refreshed, for example. An agency employee taps a particular step of the workflow on which assistance is needed, and the system sends the appropriate person an e-mail message with a link, Juracka said. The recipient simply clicks on the link and is taken to the target page or form.

XDimensional's hosted service is a completely Web-native system, Juracka said. Once an agency has signed on for the service, an offsite employee needs only a PC with Internet access to work from home or other location.

“Our app is highly scalable,” Juracka stated. He said that at a Microsoft testing facility in Mountain View, Calif., in a simulated environment with many times more users than in any existing insurance organization, the system easily passed the stress tests.

“Last year we earned the endorsement of the Council of Insurance Agents & Brokers-the first time they have endorsed an agency management system,” Juracka said, “and we also have the endorsement of the Michigan Association of Independent Agents.”

The initial set-up fee per user is based on the size of the agency organization and typically ranges from $1,000 to $1,495 per user. This figure includes some training and other bundled services, such as a basic data conversion. ? la carte training also is available if the agency desires more. Users then pay a monthly service fee that includes the hosting service, unlimited support and any enhancements made to a product. Pricing per user begins at $99 per month, Juracka said. For clients with 25 to 99 users, the cost is $79 per user per month, and agencies with 100 users or more pay $59 per user per month. As the product evolves, additional features and upgrades are automatically added to the service.

Special Reports /

A look at the latest in systems for running an agency

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