Ralph Sukla, Michigan Millers Mutual Insurance
When Ralph Sukla joined Michigan Millers Mutual Insurance Company in 2001 as its first vice president of information systems, the carrier was one year into an outsourcing agreement with a vendor to consolidate all policy processing functions and to implement an e-business straight-through-processing solution for all lines of business. Unfortunately, the project was not going as well as expected.
"Our CEO was concerned about the project's progress and really wanted someone who could muster the resources, march forward, and get the company on track," Sukla explains.
Intrigued by the challenge, Sukla accepted the position at the Lansing, Mich.-based company, rolled up his sleeves, and got to work. Due to being acquired, the original vendor's software development plans had changed, and it would not be Web-enabling its consolidation platform, a key requirement of Michigan Millers.
"We're too small to be able to develop a system of that magnitude from the ground up, so we had to look at other offerings," says Sukla, who oversees 26 full-time employees in the IS department.
Michigan Millers provides auto, homeowners, and agribusiness insurance as well as a full range of property/casualty insurance for small and midsize businesses. Writing business in 13 states, the company's 2004 revenue reached close to $200 million.
By December 2002, Michigan Millers had selected Duck Creek Technologies' Example Platform and its e-business straight-through-processing project was getting back on track.
Meanwhile, Sukla and his team were busy laying the foundation for the carrier's consolidation project by migrating its legacy applications from a mainframe to an AS/400 platform and a local area network of UNIX and Win2000 servers. Michigan Millers also implemented a data warehouse using Microsoft's OLAP/ Analysis Services tools and ProClarity products for front-end viewing and report generation. The data warehouse combined all of the company's financial, operational, and management data into a common repository for access and use by the business units and IS.
In addition, the IS department began an imaging project to digitize all of the company's policy and claim files while implementing automated electronic workflow to speed the movement of documents through the company.
As someone who has spent his entire career in IT and the insurance industry, Sukla is comfortable working on multiple projects. A graduate of Bucks College with a degree in business information systems, he has worked for several insurance carriers in various management roles but spent the majority of his career at American Reliance Insurance Company in Lawrenceville, N.J., before it was acquired by Vik Brothers Insurance Group.
As for Michigan Millers' multiyear e-business project, Sukla says the company rolled out the personal auto segment internally in August 2004 and expects to roll out a rewritten version for its independent agents in January 2006. Home-owners and personal umbrella were rolled out internally and to agents this fall.
The segment for commercial lines currently is under development, with initial rollout anticipated in the second quarter of 2006. Sukla expects the project to be completed by early 2008.
"We're disappointed it's taken us longer than anticipated to get the automation in place, but we have the momentum behind us and are moving in the right direction now," he says.
In addition to Duck Creek, Michigan Millers is using business process integration software from Metaserver to facilitate data integration from independent agents and external partners and Seagull's Transidium product to support automated renewal conversion. Like Duck Creek's Example Platform, Metaserver's integration engine was a fairly new product when the company selected it in 2002, and being an early adopter came with its own set of challenges.
"There's an associated risk with wanting to be out there on the edge," Sukla admits. "If we were to begin the implementation now, we wouldn't have experienced many of the issues we did, but then we also wouldn't have the products in place today, either."
Aside from increasing accuracy and improving productivity by providing agents with the ability to process transactions 24/7, Sukla indicates the e-business project will help Michigan Millers lower costs and position the company to handle more business within its existing infrastructure.
Sharon Baker is a freelance business writer based in Charlotte, N.C.
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