Featured insurance industry case studiesSee how we're helping customers increase agility and reduce costsMicrosoft and our ecosystem of partners deliver solutions to help customers enable a people-ready business: one that builds customer connections and strengthens profitable customer relationships. Here are some examples. View case studies for:  ACORDThe insurance industry’s standards-setting body, ACORD, needed a standard way for employees and members to communicate. It needed to cut costs and boost productivity among its global membership. Its new unified communications platform uses Microsoft technologies that cost up to 80 percent less than alternatives, yet enable users to move seamlessly among document management; instant messaging; telephony; and voice, video, and Web conferencing.  Allianz IndonesiaAllianz deployed Microsoft Office Groove 2007 with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to sustain business operations, minimize interruptions, and provide superior customer support in times of crisis. With Office Groove 2007, Allianz users set up shared workspaces in which teams share and update vital business continuity documents and customer information. Authorized users can modify these documents, which are then synchronized automatically in the shared workspace on team members' computers. Allianz maintains business continuity plans on an Office SharePoint Server 2007 site, and the plans are automatically downloaded into Office Groove 2007. In an emergency, an Office Groove 2007 workspace with business continuity plans and essential customer data is automatically provisioned from Office SharePoint Server 2007.  AROPE InsuranceSales employees at Lebanese insurance company AROPE were struggling to cope with an expanding customer base. The firm needed a management solution that connected customers to its insurance policies. Working with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Netways, the company implemented Microsoft Dynamics CRM to integrate with its core policy management system. Now the sales team is better equipped to check customer activity, view policy information, and produce detailed reports from single data entry.  EsuranceEsurance has been offering auto insurance policies online since 1999. Today, the majority of its customers purchase their policies from the company’s user-friendly Web site. Many of those customers carry mobile devices, so Esurance decided to migrate some of its applications to run in the mobile environment. The company chose the software-plus-services strategy to offer this new option for using its products. In just six weeks, Esurance used the Microsoft NET Framework 3.5 to migrate its applications to the Windows Mobile 6.1 operating system. It also integrated two services: a text-messaging gateway and AutoWatch, which customers use to view photos of their car being repaired at an auto body shop. Esurance is poised to capture the mobile market with more claims-related features than the competition and expects to boost customer retention, cut costs, and drive revenue.  Grange InsuranceFor nearly 75 years, Grange Insurance has offered competitive products and services to policyholders in more than a dozen U.S. states. To maintain its well-earned reputation and standing, the company decided to enhance its rating engine—a software tool for rating policies and performing what-if modeling, impact analyses, and other vital activities. Working with the Sophic Group and using the Microsoft Visual Studio Team System development environment and Microsoft Visual F# programming language, Grange Insurance parallelized its rating engine to take better advantage of multicore server hardware, and in so doing garnered significant performance benefits. Processes that used to require hours now take just minutes, enabling the company to trim time-to-market by weeks and making it far easier for independent agents to sell and service Grange products.  Ministry of Health Kingdom of BahrainThe Bahrain Ministry of Health wanted to increase collaboration between its teams working from decentralized locations across the island country and to streamline administrative processes. Microsoft Gold Certified Partner IDEAS IT developed a Web-based content management system using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. The new intranet portal has increased employee productivity significantly, with the time it takes to secure policy approval cut from months to days.  PGGMPGGM is the second-largest pension fund in the Netherlands, providing pension packages to more than two million former and current employees in the healthcare and social work sector. The company has 1,000 employees, who work in four buildings in the city of Zeist. Personnel formerly relied on e-mail and the telephone to communicate between offices, which often involved several time-consuming attempts to contact a colleague before getting a response. To address this problem of lost productivity, PGGM opted to take part in the Rapid Deployment Program for Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007. Participating employees can now contact each other immediately using Enterprise instant messaging. With presence awareness, they know which staff members are available and how to contact them. As a result, employees resolve time-sensitive issues more quickly and have more time available for tasks that contribute directly to the company's profitability.  Roper Insurance and Financial ServicesRoper Insurance is passionate about exceeding customer expectations—an objective that requires time and attentiveness, plus a comprehensive technology solution. The company uses Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, and Windows Small Business Server 2003 plus the 2007 Microsoft Office system and Windows Vista Business to shave hours off of daily tasks. Since implementing these solutions, business has grown 500 percent.  SafecoSafeco, a Fortune 500 property and casualty insurance company, selected Accenture to help implement a new product development system for its commercial and personal insurance businesses. Safeco will implement Accenture's Insurance Configuration Component Solution, an advanced modular software application that provides support for centralized product definitions, interoperability with external engines, premodeled product changes, and Microsoft .NET 3.0 for Web services and a Service Oriented Architecture. The new system will help centralize and enhance Safeco's product development capabilities across all geographies. Safeco anticipates that the solution will provide the ability to quickly configure and analyze new product logic for improved speed to market and reduced implementation costs associated with introducing new products to the marketplace.  United Network for Organ SharingIn addition to facilitating every organ transplant in the United States, the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) drives the development of organ transplantation policy. More than 30 UNOS-supported committees of geographically dispersed representatives from all aspects of transplantation-including UNOS-employed liaisons-meet regularly to establish and improve policies. To help employees traveling to and from these meetings remain productive and to simplify collaboration among committees, UNOS upgraded its messaging and collaboration infrastructure using Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, and Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007. With its enhanced capabilities, UNOS expects to increase the productivity of remote employees, simplify teamwork, and minimize support needs so that its IT department can focus on strategic, value-adding tasks.
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