Shortly after Hallmark General Agency became a subsidiary of Hallmark Financial Services in 2002, Gregg Birdsall arrived as CIO of the parent company. One of the priorities stated to him was the need to prepare Hallmark General Agency for growth but with a modest amount of additional overhead.
HGA, a commercial lines and nonstandard auto insurer, has been using a combination of solutions on the policy side and on the claims side, but the systems did not integrate well, according to Birdsall. "We needed to be more nimble, flexible, and in control of our own destiny," he says. "As we went to change the company, we wanted to make sure we had more control and flexibility to make the changes we needed to without incurring an overhead associated with what most companies would have when they are in multistate ISO environments."
HGA leaders put in extensive time creating an RFP to develop the infrastructure for its agent portal application, along with an assessment of the company's current operating environment from the operational, underwriting, claims, and billing viewpoints. "We needed more automation at the operational level," says Birdsall. "At the same time, we needed flexibility for change."
HGA did research with the individual managers to set a vision of what they would like to do within their particular departments and try to avoid any overly complex business process reengineering, explains Birdsall. "We wanted to focus on what [the individual departments] did and improve what they are doing from a workflow perspective, a policy production perspective, and a management reporting perspective," he says.
HGA distributed the RFP to 32 companies and then narrowed that down to a smaller number. Several companies were invited for an in-depth review of their solution, and Birdsall reports the carrier selected two systems to marry together.
One was the PREMIA application, a Web-based integrated insurance management system from 3i Infotech, which is where the Oracle requirement came in. PREMIA runs on an Oracle Database, which will enable Hallmark to create a reliable, centralized data repository and will help eliminate legacy system redundancies that increase IT management requirements and costs.?Hallmark also is deploying Oracle Application Server to integrate business applications and power an agent portal that will incorporate flexibility and scalability to support the company's growth.?In addition, HGA selected ISO Rating Services, which the carrier interfaces with the PREMIA application, allowing HGA to stay up-to-date on ISO requirements.
"It's a very complex project," says Birdsall. "It's moving forward well in some areas, and we've run into some bumpy roads in other areas." Fortunately, Birdsall believes the solution HGA hoped it would achieve when it began the project over two years ago will come to fruition in the middle of this year. "In order to get there and make sure we have a maintainable system requires quite a bit of customization on the PREMIA side," he says.
Birdsall describes the new system as the carrier's "go-forward strategic platform." Hallmark is structured in a federated environment, so the company does not mandate what technologies are used in each of its subsidiaries. "We encourage them to take advantage of systems we have and to take a good look at what is going on [with HGA]," he says.
The only issue that concerns Birdsall involves scaling the system, but he adds that is where the company will rely on the capabilities of Oracle. "What helped us decide on PREMIA is it sat on top of Oracle, which is a fine and robust platform," he says. "That helped us move forward with our decision."
Birdsall does not expect to have problems as Hallmark grows the number of users on the system. "Depending on how you look at it, we could have a company of, say, 250 to 275 employees in our four subsidiaries, or we could have a virtual company with all our independent agencies, which would mean a couple of thousand users," he says. "We intend to have all our agencies have access to the system. That was one of our considerations."
Based on models, Birdsall believes HGA is going to be in great shape in terms of the carrier's financials. "The actual benefit we have is we are in more control; we are saving money in the end," he says. "It allows us to grow the business in terms of both premium volume and the number of states and lines of business without incurring incremental costs that go with a lot of policy systems."
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