technical excellence award
Brethren Mutual Insurance Company
Advanced Billing Notice Modification
The Advanced Billing notice modification allows the Brethren Mutual Insurance Company to send its customers detailed notices explaining the transactions that transpired and the impact of these transactions to their account. These notices reflect important customer information, such as agent, amounts due, due date, possible cancellation information, reinstatement information and more. Numerous notices are utilized for various situations, such as installment billings, endorsements, cancellations, reinstatements, returned checks and audits. Each notice must meet certain criteria. There are also numerous notices that have additional DAP criteria, which can lead to different information being printed on similar notice types. Brethren issues all policies on a Temporary Bill status. Policyholders are offered multiple pay plans to select from. These pay plans are based on total policy premiums. Installment billing notices are then produced at each installment based on the pay plan selected at the beginning of the term. Subsequent transactions could produce additional notices, such as endorsement notices for additional or return premium, lapse notices, cancellation notices for non-pay, reinstatement notices with or without money due, and various returned check or electronic payment notices. Brethren also processes audits on several lines of business. These transactions produce different notices based on the result of the audit. This modification improves the communication between the company and its publics. A more detailed billing invoice is available, and various payment options are displayed in detail to help reduce non-pay situations by giving clients more ways to budget their funds. Important information, such as reason for invoice, due dates and minimum payment amounts, are conveniently displayed on the invoice, minimizing confusion and questions. This saves time and money by reducing the communications between the client, agent and company.
Federated Mutual Insurance
Exceed DVR - Automated Regression Testing
Federated wanted an automated method to test a group of CDRs without having to maintain a regression test bed or purchase specialized software. The automated method needed to test critical business transactions (as defined by Federated) in sufficient volume to ensure that production activity would not be negatively affected by the CDR upgrade. Federated installed a configurable listener in HALUMHTP that records each request UMT message to a DB2 table. The linkage data that is sent to other programs in the COMMAREA is stored in a second DB2 table. A COBOL program identifies production accounts for a test suite and testing duration based on recent activity that satisfies the “critical functions” and test suite size parameters. Federated identified 50 unique actions in billing as critical. Federated modified HALUMHTP in a parallel region to receive input from the DB2 tables rather than the CommFW. Each request transaction is read from the DB2 table and inserted into the development request UMT as if the request came from the development front end. Once all the request messages have been processed, the batch cycle is set up and executed. At the completion of the batch cycle all of the DB2 data tables are unloaded to files. Both the filtered production unload and the development unload have environmental data items scrubbed. (i.e. timestamps, sequence numbers, etc.) Finally the two file sets are sorted and compared to produce a report of all differences by DB2 table. The difference reports are manually analyzed and each discrepancy is explained. The result is an efficient, yet comprehensive regression test that definitively highlights the changes from a release. Any set of production transactions can be replayed in a development environment over and over again, effectively functioning like a Digital Video Recorder (DVR).
GEICO
Invoice CPU Reduction
GEICO made valuable performance and central processing unit (CPU) reduction changes to BCMOIV (an Exceed billing/invoice program) for invoice processing. The GEICO database administrator and information services staff reviewed the current structured query language (SQL) for the charge amount table. They modified the existing SQL to use CASE statements with row processing. These changes reduced DB2 CPU utilization by 22 percent and overall BCIV transactions by 7.5 percent. The elapsed time for BCIV was also reduced.
Look forward to seeing details on the release on WikonnecT.
Horace Mann Insurance Group
CDT - Data Warehouse Project
Horace Mann has established a data warehouse and Business Analytics initiative to provide unparalleled insight into its claims business. As a user of CSC's Claims Desktop, Horace Mann has a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) claims integration foundation in place linking its claims administrative system with claims tools and third-party applications including several CSC claims applications, Audatex, MSB, Copart, DKA and Enterprise Rent-a-Car. The Claims Desktop routes electronic messages between applications when claim events occur. Horace Mann, recognizing the value of the detailed data historically locked away in these external vendor tools and systems, worked with CSC to adapt the Claims Desktop to forward all of the vendors' claim data messages currently routed through the Claims Desktop into their data warehouse. This data integration allows Horace Mann's data warehouse to be constantly updated with the most up-to-date, accurate and detailed claim information for unrivaled visibility into business operations.
Safeway, Inc.
RISKMASTER X in a VMWare Virtual Environment
Safeway’s IT RISKMASTER X project team members are passionate about implementing and improving the quality of RISKMASTER X in the Safeway environment. To make sure RISKMASTER X was given the best in new technology, Safeway IT chose to run RISKMASTER X in a VMWare virtual environment that is able to sustain a 300+ user base. The Safeway IT project team chose this approach to reduce costs and provide redundancy, load balancing and failover. Server virtualization significantly reduces hardware, energy and management overhead. Server virtualization is also a key building block of a dynamic IT infrastructure, which is all about efficiency, resiliency and agility.
By performing an evaluation of RISKMASTER X application behavior, the Safeway IT team determined that performance degraded each time you returned to the main claim screen. In partnership with CSC and the CSC development team, Safeway IT recommended that RISKMASTER X performance could be improved by code optimization and the application of indexes to the entity table. When Safeway IT and CSC developers added indexes to key tables, the results were remarkable and performance was significantly improved. User satisfaction increased along with RISKMASTER X adaptation and user acceptance during training and implementation.
Additionally, Safeway and CSC collaborated on multiple in-and-out interfaces, some using utilities and others working with the tables directly. Safeway integrated RISKMASTER X with its internal Sun Access Manager, which adds an extra layer of security as well as single sign-on capabilities with other internal Safeway applications. It also allows single sign-on capabilities with external entities via SAML token exchange.
To assure system performance, Safeway IT decided to use a replicated database for reporting with BusinessObjects, which is synced nightly. Safeway is able to bring non-RISKMASTER X data into the reporting environment as well.
The Safeway IT project team and CSC technical staff hold regular meetings to facilitate RISKMASTER X system improvement and advanced architecture. Safeway’s willingness to allocate extraordinary resources to a project that is ancillary to its core business is an amazing testament to its dedication and commitment to the RISKMASTER X project.
State Auto Insurance Companies
Personal Lines Straight-Through Processing Implementation
Year after year, State Auto remains at the forefront with the other companies that have embraced the Extend, Enhance and Evolve strategy with stunning success. After implementing Series II Straight-Through Processing, Exceed Billing, Exceed Client, Exceed Claims and Agency Link for its commercial Lines, State Auto has proceeded to deploy the same strategy with its personal Lines as well. The company recently completed an above-the-line technical upgrade in preparation for a personal lines Straight-Through Processing implementation which will begin to show benefits in Summer 2010. This most recent STP implementation has greatly accelerated the code-to-market testing process, and lays the foundation for future real-time enablement of State Auto’s existing Web front end. By leveraging the leading-edge technology and componentized approach of the Series II Extend, Enhance and Evolve strategy, State Auto has been able to preserve and invigorate time-honored business applications that have made it one of the industry’s great success stories.
Unitrin, Inc.
Exceed Core Policy System Replacement
Unitrin’s strategy is to reduce IT expense and improve customer service through a strategic use of technology that provides common electronic insurance services across multiple P&C companies, and replaces outdated batch systems with modern, function-rich, real-time software that is platform independent. CSC’s Exceed J (Java) for Policy, Billing and Client, in conjunction with a variety of ancillary shared services developed by Unitrin Services Group, is central to this strategy.
Policy Event Records (PERS) is an innovative foundational piece of this strategy. PERS is an event-driven architecture approach to tackle the distribution of policy data to downstream systems using a canonical model based on ACORD XML in real time. Traditional policy systems typically use flat file interfaces created during batch cycles to extract data from the system of record, format it in a proprietary format and transmit the data via FTP or file transfer to the downstream system. This creates a number of issues ranging from stale data between systems to the difficulty of changing an interface between one or more downstream systems. With the PERS approach, the data is represented in an industry standard format and delivered in real time over a reliable transport mechanism. For each policy event (add, modify, cancel, etc.,) an XML record is created that represents that policy at that point in time. This data can be acted on by a subscribing system immediately, thereby providing better business visibility and better customer support.
An additional benefit of the model exists when the real-time records are captured and stored in an event journal. Storing these records provides a snapshot view for any system that requires point-in-time visibility to policy data. Unitrin’s Kemper subsidiary has implemented this design and processed approximately 3 million PERS records in the past year. Both Exceed C and Exceed J benefit from this innovation.
Western National Insurance Company
Underwrite As You Go
Western National Insurance Group has partnered with CSC to develop "Underwrite As You Go" (UAYG) in order to notify agents as early as possible in the application entry process that an underwriting decline condition exists on the policy. UAYG was developed for WNI's Businessowners Policy (BOP) product using POINT IN Rules technology. This technology will allow Western National's partner agents to enter a minimal amount of information on the front-end Agency Link portal before a decision to continue or decline is made. As a result, agents spend less time on entry before they are informed of decline. At the exit of each policy page, a configurable option is made available to call POINT IN Rules for evaluation of the policy data. If a decline condition is encountered, the policy will be placed in a ‘declined’ status and the agent is navigated to the declination page. This technology, paired with Western National's straight-through processing ability for BOP, creates a very exciting product. Combined with the new Mosaic field-level decision-making capability in the future, this technology will give WNI even more refined expert underwriting capabilities.
