Regional insurers, such as Southern Farm Bureau Casualty (SFBC), spent a lot of years insuring risks in their primary market area, but the advent of Internet technology and call centers has allowed carriers from all over the country to open new markets with a minimal investment. It doesnt always matter to policyholders what the locally based insurer has done for the region when it comes time to renew a policy. People want the best deal. So SFBC figured whats good for the competition is good for SFBC.
Speeding up policy issuance didnt used to be a problem 20 years ago, says Dane Truhett, manager of media and communications for SFBC. But its getting to be more and more of a problem when customers can dial 1-800 or apply over the Internet and have automatic underwriting done, approved, and have a product purchased in one day versus somebody taking two weeks. Moving quickly has benefits for both the insurers and the insureds. Your costs are reduced. Labor is reduced, he says. More important, customer service goes way up.
Like most insurers, SFBC felt it also needed to do something about the volume of paper it was producing. Combine that with streamlining processes to reduce the amount of time needed to approve applications, and SFBC had some important issues to face. The main issue that had to be resolved, though, was putting images in front of multiple people so they could make quicker decisions.
SFBC had an imaging system in place. While some companies combine imaging and workflow simultaneously, Truhett says imaging is easier to install if you do it only on the back end rather than combining it with workflow and having to re-engineer business processes. We got all the imaging stuff straight first, he says. Then we decided to implement the workflow and move the imaging to the front of the process so the images become the catalyst for kicking off the workflow.
A committee was formed to look at the solutions on the market. Among the members were the vice president of the companys biggest line, flood insurance, the team leader of the imaging solutions technical support group, and applications personnel. Truhett feels this gave the company both a functional and a technical comparison. We could see whether it would work with our architecture from a technical standpoint, and we had the functional analysis for the business process, he says.
Westbrook won out. The vendor was very aggressive in trying to meet our needs, says Truhett. Plus, the product was flexible. Missy McKee, imaging solutions tech support leader for SFBC, adds, The Fortis software [from West-brook] and the programming we did gave us a connection so we can actually send data to and grab data from our mainframe to update tables.
McKee admits initiating workflow into the companys process was a huge change. Things went smoothly, though. Implementation began midway through 2002. Were still in the process of working out certain kinks, she says. We had to determine if a certain process really is what we wanted and how we wanted to handle the process. Were getting down to the final lines.
Problems with the system were not major, either. There were some technical issues that came up with interfacing, but they were simply problems you had to work through, says Truhett.
Flood insurance is the major line for SFBC, and since it is a federally run program, it is different than most P&C insurance. The Westbrook system helped SFBC speed up its flood policy issuance. From the time we receive the application, qualify it, accept it, and get it back to the customer, that [process] has probably been the biggest benefit, says Truhett.
It also has made things more profitable, as the company was able to eliminate one position in its flood department. Truhett says workflow is a hard thing to put on a spreadsheet to determine a return on investment, but SFBC knows it is there. How do you define going from four to five days to do something to one or two days? he asks.
He does know one thing for sure, though. We have lower storage costs, since we dont have to store paper anymore.
CaseFile
The Challenge: Establish workflow that would reduce the amount of paper and speed up policy issuance.
THE COMPANY: Southern Farm Bureau Casualty
NET WRITTEN PREMIUM: $1 billion
WEB SITE: www.sfbcic.com
THE SOLUTION: Fortis by Westbrook Technology
WEB SITE: www.westbrooktech.com
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