Improving Customer Service by automating business processes and connecting legacy systems— Chubb Insurance Company of Canada.

Background

The Chubb Insurance Company of Canada (Chubb) has been providing a select group of individuals and companies with property and casualty insurance solutions, through a national network of offices and a team of independent insurance brokers.

The Challenge

As a leading underwriter for Canada's entertainment industry, Chubb's Custom Market Department is responsible for insuring entertainment clients, which involves many time-consuming manual processes within a tight 24-hour deadline.

It is a fast-paced entertainment business that involves the tedious process of collecting thousands of details from film shoot locations to medical certificates of every person working on the set. Chubb wanted to revamp its application and underwriting practice with an online insurance application.

The paper trail begins with the independent insurance broker completing and faxing Chubb an application for a quote on a policy. Once received, the request is manually inputted into the stand-alone computer system used to process policies and the output is handed to an underwriter for review. The underwriter may request additional third-party forms to be submitted such as medical certificates or information from the prospective clients' lawyers.

The amount of paper generated in a typical insurance policy includes a 10-page application, a 20-page errors-and-omissions document and another four pages of supporting certificates per cast member. Needless to say, Chubb's underwriters were becoming mired in paper. In fact, they were involved in so many time-consuming paper related tasks that they became concerned that they would not be able to keep up with an aggressive double-digit growth rate of requests for quotes from their dedicated independent sales agents.

The Solution

Chubb decided to develop a full-scale pilot project as a first attempt to employ technology to transfer data back and forth between public and corporate systems and automate business processes. This technical platform would help Chubb increase underwriting efficiencies and written premium volume by automating key components in the underwriting process to better serve their brokers and end-customers while significantly reducing expenses. Although new technology was required to transfer data between internal systems and the brokers via a public extranet, one of the pilot's requirements was that the solution had to leverage existing systems and not recreate any existing processes.

Chubb chose our Microsoft Gold Certified Partner for Commerce Solutions, to quickly web-enable Chubb's legacy systems and build an online insurance application to help automate underwriting processes. We selected the tightly integrated combination of Microsoft BizTalk® Server 2000 as both the workflow and enterprise application integration engine, Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 as the high-performance database and Microsoft Windows® 2000 Advanced Server as the reliable and secure foundation for the solution.

We completed the pilot project including planning, development and implementation in just three weeks with only three consultants. "The BizTalk® Mapper helped make this tight deadline possible by cutting the time it took to create the business logic in half," said Chris Trauzzi, Director of Microsoft Business Unit, Cyberplex Inc. "As our software engineer quickly connected the legacy systems to the new online Web forms using a visual diagramming interface, a non- technical Chubb business analyst immediately validated each step of the workflow design."

By seamlessly integrating legacy computing systems and automating numerous time-intensive business processes with a web-enabled insurance application form, Chubb's full-scale technology pilot using our EAI Solution demonstrates:

• A reduction in time-consuming tasks by enabling brokers to input information directly into the system through a web application on Chubb's extranet, and by programming forms to validate the information as it is entered
• Chubb's underwriters could dedicate more time to concentrating higher value tasks such as carefully analyzing the risks, as computers managed more of the logistical details of the flow of information
• Technology could allow more applications for policies to be reviewed by improving staff efficiencies
• Relationships are enhanced with Chubb's independent brokers and the relationships between brokers' and their customers
• As the business processes leverage automation and the internal and external computer systems seamlessly transmit information back and forth, the ultimate winner is the end customer who obtains a highly customized quote in record time