(Chesapeake Bay. Photo credit: Nora Lives.)
Harford Mutual Insurance Company (Bel Air, Maryland), has selected the Sapiens North American Property and Casualty Insurance Platform. The insurer will implement Sapiens’ (Holon, Israel) Policy, Rating, Work Manager, Product Designer, and Authority platform components, according to a vendor statement.
Tim Baum, CIO, Harford Mutual.
Prior to selection Harford Mutual undertook an extensive proof of concept (POC), designed to address its most difficult challenges. The insurer cites the Sapiens system’s configurability and the ability to achieve self-sufficiency as key to its selection decision.
In pursuit of the goal of self-sufficiency, Harford Mutual’s team worked side-by-side during the POC with the Sapiens team to implement key deliverables of its Business Owners Policy product, according the vendor. Efforts included configuration of over 20 web pages and 12 different transactions, including: new business, endorsements, renewal, out of sequence processing, verification of rating algorithms, specific interfaces such as address validation, geocoding, etc. Sapiens characterizes the POC as having been a tremendous success with the decision made to complete work on the BOP product and to continue the rollout of all of Harford Mutual’s lines of business onto the Sapiens platform.
Sapiens Stood Out in the Market
“After the proof of concept effort, we are extremely confident in the capabilities of the Sapiens platform and are especially impressed with the configurability of the product suite,” comments Tim Baum, CIO, Harford Mutual. “Sapiens really stood out in the market when we realized that with the Sapiens product, our business analysts can configure nearly every aspect of our products without reliance on our internal developers or the Sapiens’ staff. That’s the true definition of configurable.”
Steve Linkous, President and CEO, Harford Mutual.
The proof of concept gave Sapiens the opportunity to help Harford Mutual fully understand the capabilities and flexibility of its platform, while also getting a head start on the knowledge transfer necessary for Harford Mutual to meet its self-sufficiency goal, according to John Pettit, head of Sapiens’ North American P&C Insurance Platform business unit. “Like so many forward-thinking insurers looking to enhance the operation with the effective application of new technology, Harford Mutual understood the importance of selecting a system that could adapt to their business needs rather than having to conform their operation to function within the confines of an inflexible system’s capabilities,” he comments.
Platform for Growth and Ease of Product Development
“We anticipate the Sapiens system will not only provide us with the operational efficiencies and self-sufficiency for our current business, but will also afford us a platform to support our planned growth with the ease of developing new products and quickly expanding our business to new states,” comments Steve Linkous, President and CEO, Harford Mutual.
Sapiens illustrates the configuration capabilities and flexibility of the Sapiens platform though a sampling of its capabilities (as described by the vendor):
- A configuration exercise that required five clicks and 45 seconds to complete by a Harford Mutual staff member would have required approximately four hours of work on the company’s existing legacy system.
- After only an hour of training, Harford Mutual staff were entering rating algorithms in product-ready formulas with to-the-penny accurate results compared to its legacy system.
- 90 percent of policy data from the legacy system was successfully converted in approximately seven days with minimized work-hours.
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