The world of mobile communication is not limited to big cities. Rural carriers, such as Mennonite Mutual Insurance, have distinct needs of their own as they often service wide areas for customers that expect quick and timely service just like their big-city brethren.
Mennonite Mutual needed a mobile solution for its marketing and loss control representatives to use in the field. During the search process, the commercial lines insurer—offering coverage for churches and large farms—met with Hyland Software about developing a mobile solution to leverage some of Hyland's tools.
Mennonite Mutual, founded in 1895, is located in Orrville, Ohio, hometown of J.M. Smucker of jelly-making fame (and basketball coach Bob Knight). Smucker was the first president of Mennonite Mutual, which insures property in Ohio and Indiana.
Mennonite Mutual deals strictly through the independent agency network. The policy process begins with a request for quote from one of their agents, according to Jennings Carpenter, director of IT for the carrier.
"The agent submits a request for quote, which is simply an e-form on our agency portal," he says. "That comes into an underwriting workflow where the underwriter will do a pre-assessment to determine whether it is worth sending a marketing rep to inspect the property. Our model is we pre-inspect all our churches and large farms. Once the decision is made, the information is preloaded into a tablet. Marketing reps have the information that summarizes the risk and anything the underwriter picked up."
Loss control representatives conduct the pre-loss inspection, which includes use of a thermal imaging camera.
"We also have a sketching application to sketch the dimensions of the property and we take photos as well," says Carpenter. "They will fill out the loss assessment which is then used by the underwriter for the rating and issuing of the policy. They will gather all the information and sync it back to the home office, which kicks it into a workflow for the underwriter."
Mennonite Mutual has used the application programming interface that Hyland provides to populate the quote system so the marketing reps don't have to enter that information in order to generate a quote, which Carpenter believes is a major time saver for the carrier.
The underwriter will produce the proposal that goes to the agency and the potential insured. It then feeds back to the underwriter when the agent gets the signature. Mennonite Mutual then creates and issues the policy, explains Carpenter.
Hyland also has integration through smartphones, which allow users to create forms on the iPhone, the Android or the Blackberry, explains Fisk.
"We have a full set of mobile capabilities," says Ruth Fisk, Hyland's senior analyst for insurance. "We believe it is a combination of hardware devices as well as processes because there are so many different facets of the work that needs to be done in the field."
Mennonite Mutual purchased its tablet devices from Motion Computing, but Carpenter admits the carrier is interested in the Windows 8 tablets that Hyland is using for its mobile claims solution, which Mennonite Mutual has yet to sign up for. The OnBase Mobile solution tested out well, according to Carpenter.
"We put it in the hands of one of our top marketing guys—one who would put it through its paces the most. He used it in the field and worked with it," says Carpenter. "We had to make adjustments based on his recommendations and also get the interface with our back-end systems—quoting and policy—to make sure all the info gets where it needs to be."
Mennonite Mutual operates with a legacy mainframe system, but Carpenter feels Hyland's application interface makes things seamless for the user, whether they are on the legacy system, the portal, or wherever they are.
"The information stays the same throughout," he says. "That's a big plus for us over some of the other solutions. It's a huge advantage not only as far as efficiency but it gets us in the marketplace with our agents with better tools than what the other carrier have to offer. It gives us a competitive advantage within that independent agency."
Mennonite is able to extract the information they capture on the tablet and push it directly into their core system, which Fisk adds is "another element of efficiency."
Carpenter agrees. "It would not have been a big enough win for us if we were unable to integrate because you can't pick up efficiencies," he says. "This was a slam dunk as far as ROI."
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