2 page Case Study - Posted 3/15/2007

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Triangle Company, The

Midwest Insurer Grows Business 250 Percent with Faster Workflow, Greater Intelligence

Triangle Insurance Company, a Midwestern insurance company, used a proprietary AS/400 solution that slowed workflow and limited business intelligence. So the company migrated to Atlas,  an end-to-end property/casualty software administration system from Property & Casualty Management Systems, a Microsoft® Certified Partner. Triangle Insurance has grown its business 250 percent, to U.S.$25 million, while increasing its underwriting staff only 25 percent.

Business Needs

Triangle Insurance Company, a member of The Triangle Companies, provides commercial insurance products and services to agricultural cooperatives and agribusinesses in an 11-state area. The Triangle Companies have come a long way since their start in 1916 when, as the Farmers Cooperative Grain Dealers Association of Oklahoma, they provided services such as locating railcars for their farmer members to use during harvest. Today, as part of The Triangle Companies, Triangle Insurance Company provides insurance products and services to clients in 11 midwestern states. The insurance company was formed in 1992. It has grown from having written U.S.$5 million in premiums in 1997 to having $25.5 million in 2006.

At first, the company managed the processing of its insurance policies through an AS/400 solution. When the company decided to terminate its relationship with the vendor, it had just months in which to adopt another solution.

Executives at the company were determined to avoid what they saw as the shortcomings of the previous solution. Information supplied by company agents, and the results of the under-writers’ rating application, had to be manually rekeyed into the solution to create and update policies, which increased costs and cut into productivity. Because the system worked on batch-file processing rather than real-time processing, workflow was reduced further.

The highly complex nature of the AS/400 solution meant that the company avoided changing the system. Many changes were cost prohibitive or delayed due to the vendor’s schedule. As a result, executives often went without requesting changes that would have added value, but at too high a cost and with too long a wait. Similarly, it was difficult to implement the custom reporting that executives needed in order to support the company’s highly customized policies. Much of the information was locked inside the AS/400 and unavailable to executives.

Solution

As executives at Triangle Insurance Company researched a new solution, the options they found were mainly expensive and based on proprietary technology, which would have locked them into a single-vendor offering. Some products offered user interfaces that were Web-based or based on the Windows® XP Professional operating system—but these presentation layers masked legacy-type applications and databases that would have brought company executives back to the same problems they were trying to avoid.

The Atlas solution enabled us to grow faster than we’ve ever grown before. Because we eliminated the need for redundant data entry, our underwriters can now concentrate on doing their jobs to rate and underwrite policies. Bret Wilson Manager of Compliance and Information, The Triangle Company

Triangle Insurance Company runs Atlas on the Windows Server® 2003 operating system and Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 database software, and hosts it on three IBM xSeries computers: an application server, a database server, and a reporting server.

The company uses Atlas to support under-writing and claims activities. The solution uses data entered by the company agents, or by one of the two data-entry technicians at the home office, to generate a policy for review by one of the company’s underwriters. After the underwriter rates and approves the policy, the solution generates a completed policy including all terms and conditions, which is sent electronically to the agent to be delivered to the insured.

Underwriters and executives use SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services to generate both standard and ad hoc reports that they export to Microsoft Office Excel® 2003 spreadsheet software for additional analysis. The Triangle Companies also recently adopted the image-storage capability of Atlas, which documents are scanned and stored, along with metadata about them, in a SQL Server–based database.

Benefits

In the three years since adopting the Atlas solution, Triangle Insurance Company has increased its book of business by 250 percent, from U.S.$10 million in premiums to $25 million in premiums. And the company processed this increase in business while increasing its underwriting professional and technical staff by only 25 percent.
“The Atlas solution enabled us to grow faster than we’ve ever grown before,” says Bret Wilson, Manager of Compliance and Information, The Triangle Companies. “Because we eliminated the need for redundant data entry, our underwriters can now concentrate on doing their jobs to rate and underwrite policies. The workflow automation in Atlas gives them more time to do their jobs, and its business intelligence gives them information to be smarter about how they do those jobs. The result is that we do more business and more profitable business.”

The use of SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services is “a huge benefit,” according to Wilson. “There’s a level of detail about our business that we haven’t been able to access before,” says Wilson. “SQL Server Reporting Services gives us this information so our underwriters can be more competitive in their work. And executives can use the information available through SQL Server Reporting Services to make smarter decisions throughout the company.”

SQL Server Reporting Services is delivering more accurate information more quickly, not only to underwriters, but also to claims and accounting staff as well as to upper management. The improved access to accurate information allows the appropriate insurance company staff to run reports as needed. “Anyone can export the data to Office Excel to work with it,” says Wilson.

Perhaps the biggest overall benefit of Atlas is greater customer satisfaction. “We can finalize and print policies in minutes, make changes, and respond to customers immediately,” says Wilson. “There’s no more waiting. That’s what our customers want and—now—that’s what we can deliver.”

For more information about Property & Casualty Management Systems (PCMS) products and services, call (214) 580-5668 or visit the Web site at: 
www.pcmstech.com