Microsoft Insurance Value Chain solutions
The insurance industry is an increasingly dynamic environment—both within the enterprise, where business strategies shift, and outside the enterprise, where unanticipated opportunities and threats are constantly emerging. To remain competitive, you need to reduce IT complexity, enabling straight-through business processes that give your people the ability to unlock the agility of the insurance enterprise.
The Microsoft Insurance Value Chain (IVC) is a comprehensive approach to meeting this challenge successfully. Microsoft and its partners develop global and industry standards-based solutions that ease IT complexity and connect all facets of the insurance process, including channel sales and service, claims processing, underwriting, core policy systems, product development, and reinsurance. These solutions help you become more agile while reducing overall technology costs. They also enable a people-ready business: one that builds customer connections and strengthens profitable customer relationships.
On This Page
Business challenges
The competitive nature of the insurance industry results in an increased need for business agility and technology solutions that are both innovative and cost-effective. Today's insurance companies face multiple challenges:
| • | Updating legacy systems: A major issue for most insurers, legacy systems are inflexible and expensive to maintain, which means they negatively affect your ability to conduct business. Finding cost-effective technologies that can provide competitive differentiation and superior performance—without getting locked into inflexible solutions—is critical. |
| • | Integrating segregated business processes: The insurance industry currently works in a disconnected set of business process silos with limited ability or no ability to interoperate. The challenge is to link these business processes while working within insurance industry standards. |
| • | Managing IT costs: Lowering the overall costs of deploying, modifying, and maintaining internal and external processes is a serious challenge. The balance lies in providing employees with the technology necessary to do their jobs without incurring huge cost investments. |
| • | Streamlining business processes: Simplifying systems to reduce the amount of handling, the number of interactions, and the number and level of business and technology personnel involved in insurance business processes is critical. |
| • | Satisfying and retaining customers: A significant challenge in the increasingly competitive insurance industry is obtaining and retaining customers while simultaneously improving the customer experience. |
| • | Developing and maintaining business agility: Insurance entities must redeploy resources and deliver new products and services with speed and accuracy to be competitive. In an increasingly dynamic environment, your people must be able to meet unanticipated opportunities and threats and to respond to unexpected shifts in business strategy. |
Solutions
The Microsoft Insurance Value Chain (IVC) is a comprehensive approach based on Microsoft technologies that enables Microsoft's large partner ecosystem to develop a streamlined set of integrated applications and workflows. These solutions, based on industry standards, such as ACORD XML, link disconnected participants, systems, and processes. Leveraging industry standards leads to solutions that more easily integrate within the value chain and reduce IT complexity, leading to greater employee efficiency and reduced costs through legacy modernization.
The preinstalled interoperability of Microsoft partner-led solutions reduces the costs of deploying, modifying, and maintaining business processes while helping you take advantage of legacy investments.
Ultimately, Microsoft works with its products, partners, and industry standards in order to help you achieve business agility via straight through processing.
Case studies
Read these case studies to learn how Microsoft Insurance Value Chain solutions solutions have helped companies become more agile while reducing overall technology costs.
The Progressive Group
Progressive Prepares for Future Growth, Gains Agility with SQL Server 2005
Progressive, with annual premiums of more than U.S.$14 billion, is one of the largest insurers of private automobiles in the United States. Its internally developed application for managing policies is at the very foundation of the company’s operations. As the company prepared to replace its mainframe-based application—first deployed in 1979, and frequently updated over the years—it needed enterprise-grade technology that would scale and provide the flexibility to easily deploy new solutions. Progressive is creating its new policy management application, using Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit) database, with development being done using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0. The company’s 45,000 agents will access policy data through Web-based access supported by Microsoft technology.
Southern Farm Bureau Casualty Insurance Company
Regional Insurance Company Decreases Risk, Improves Service with Mobile Technology
Based in Mississippi, Southern Farm Bureau Casualty Insurance Company (SFBCIC) delivers insurance coverage to customers in the southern United States. The company wanted to improve service and minimize risk in the hurricane-prone region, but it was hindered by inefficient data processing. To improve how it handled data, SFBCIC implemented a solution based on the Windows Mobile operating system and the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework. The company replaced manual processes with a custom application that runs on Windows Mobile and integrates with industry-specific software. As a result, SFBCIC can reduce risk and improve customer service with faster access to more information, and employees save time with automated data handling. Underwriters collect more-detailed information, which the company can use to strengthen risk management and drive better business decisions.
Business benefits
By implementing integrated partner-led solutions based on Microsoft technology as part of the Microsoft Insurance Value Chain (IVC), your people can realize the following benefits:
Streamline business processing.
Minimizing the complexity caused by siloed processes and technologies results in more efficient, effective processing and greater employee efficiency.
Integrate partner applications and workflow processes with existing systems and applications.
Implementing an integrated set of applications and workflow processes that span channel sales and service, claims processing, underwriting, core policy systems, product development, and reinsurance creates a smooth link between your people and your customers.
Lower IT costs.
Lower costs by taking advantage of legacy investments while simultaneously charting a course for legacy modernization. Microsoft and its partners help reduce the overall costs of deploying, modifying, and maintaining internal and external processes.
Achieve business agility via straight through processing.
Enable your processes to be conducted electronically without the need for manual intervention. Flexible service-oriented architectures (SOA) that integrate new and existing applications result in operational efficiency, competitive differentiation, and improved financial performance.
Provide easier access to information.
A tightly connected infrastructure amplifies your employees' ability to access the information they need to collaborate and efficiently do their jobs. Easier access to information empowers your people to rapidly introduce innovation into processes and to more effectively monitor, improve, optimize, and collaborate around existing and new business processes.
Overview
Technology
