success story Westfield Insurance Company snapshot Regional property & casualty insurer Provides commercial and personal insurance in 21 states Provides surety services to customers in 31 states Products and services offered through a network of 1,200 independent agencies The team at Vertafore was extremely organized and knew exactly how to approach a project like this. Jason Reynolds, Underwriting Resource Leader, Westfield Insurance westfield insurance success story I
Westfield Insurance Westfield migrates multiple legacy reference-content libraries to ReferenceConnect to improve underwriter efficiency and capacity. Vertafore Solutions: ReferenceConnect Web Publishing Proven results: Reassigned eight product analysts to other departments by reducing effort needed to maintain information. 300% increase in usage from end users. Drastic reduction in the number of new documents being created by as much as 91%. 35% increase in end-user efficiency by not having to search multiple applications to find insurance information. Improvement in the user experience and productivity by having all the information that is used daily co-located. Westfield Insurance s winning vision is to embrace innovation and opportunity. They believe their strength comes through relationships that have been built with employees, business partners, and customers. To fulfill their commitment to service excellence Westfield identified an opportunity in 2013 to dramatically increase their underwriters efficiency through a plan to consolidate the information resources needed throughout their daily operations. Located in Westfield Center, OH, this property and casualty insurer touts a long history of providing protection and serving customers dating back to 1848. Westfield was originally formed by a small group of Ohio farmers to protect their property initially known as The Farmers Mutual Fire Insurance Company of Medina County, and later changed to Ohio Farmers Mutual Fire Insurance Company. The company continues to evolve but a core principle of success through sharing knowledge has remained the same over the decades as evidenced by the company tagline: Sharing Knowledge. Building Trust. That commitment to sharing knowledge across the business had grown ever more complex as the company continued to expand and new regulations and rules were enacted. Being able to effectively and efficiently consume information is critical to the underwriting process; westfield insurance success story 1
it s a fundamental capability, states Cheryl Prather, Commercial Production Leader at Westfield. Over the years our repositories for underwriting information such as rules, forms, and company manuals had become siloed and disparate. During the course of a user s day, they may need to access multiple applications each with a unique logon and learning curve in order to locate information they need to complete their tasks. This impacted the overall end-user productivity in a way we felt we needed to address. Information Silos The patchwork of content libraries in use made the underwriting process more difficult in more ways than one, Prather says. There were no documentation nor organization standards each disparate system had different standards as well as different owners, according to Prather. Maintaining the data in the legacy systems was also difficult. Prather discovered that data was duplicated in many of the applications in an attempt to prevent users from having to access multiple resources throughout the day. Maintenance of the data in the older system was cumbersome and varied by system. The rates and rules information was duplicated repeatedly by state, resulting in additional maintenance as well as a different look and feel for the same data depending on the state that was being reviewed. System limitations meant that some product information was in one system while some was in another depending on the insurance service organization which supplied them. Being able to effectively and efficiently consume information is critical to the underwriting process. Cheryl Prather, Commercial Production Leader, Westfield Insurance Complicating matters even more, most of the legacy applications did not have capabilities to provide any usage information. This created a lack of visibility into what content the end users were actually utilizing. It was this lack of visibility Prather credited with many of the problems in understanding how to best solve this issue for Westfield, The older systems did not provide usage information, increasing the difficulty to make decisions regarding when and where to expend effort or supply additional training and to understand how the investment of time and effort would even pay off. ReferenceConnect & Web Publishing Westfield had already been utilizing ReferenceConnect since 2006 as the company s single resource to aggregate and search third-party insurance content. In 2013 the company s Commercial Underwriting Office decided to kick-off a project to utilize the Web Publishing feature of ReferenceConnect to address the information silos and improve the underwriters productivity. It made a lot of sense for us to use Web Publishing, says Jason Reynolds, Underwriting Resource Leader, who was also involved westfield insurance success story 2
The team at Vertafore was extremely organized and knew exactly how to approach a project like this. Jason Reynolds, Underwriting Resource Leader, Westfield Insurance with the project. The added expense was more than offset by the cost to maintain all of these legacy systems we planned to decommission. We also were able to complete the entire project in only ten months. An implementation in such a short timeframe would not have been possible had we chosen to build a solution in-house. Maintenance of the data in the older system was cumbersome and varied by system. The initiative included conversion and consolidation of over 25,000 documents, including capturing the metadata necessary to effective date the forms and rules in the new ReferenceConnect environment. Additionally there was eight years worth of information regarding bureau data such as effective dates and applicable states which were required to facilitate the automation of setting those dates within ReferenceConnect. This information reflected the dates and states in which the company adopted new rules and rates, or filed an exception. This was used by end users to define the company products. There was all this additional commercial lines data such as underwriting guides, line of business, sector, industry content, tools and resources, applications and questionnaires that were all housed in these legacy systems. It was a lot of information to migrate, but the team at Vertafore was extremely organized and knew exactly how to approach a project like this, Reynolds states. Better Processes. More Insight. As part of the migration, Reynolds and Prather enlisted the help of one of Westfield s internal user design experts to assist with re-designing the data taxonomy for the content. Engaging with the user community directly, the team was able to design a single organizational structure for the new content which streamlined the users access to information. Reynolds also says the team is enjoying the added insight provided by the usage reports available to them. Since the team has starting tracking the usage of the content published through ReferenceConnect they have noted a 300% increase in the number of users accessing the content library an indicator of how successful the team s efforts have been. westfield insurance success story 3
The ability to combine all of our third-party information and our proprietary content into a single, searchable website has not only been a big hit with our end users, but it has also given us insight into the content s usage that was simply not possible when the information was siloed in different applications. Now, our decisions on how and when to refresh, replace, or retire content are made with intelligence, says Reynolds. ReferenceConnect was already a valued resource with our underwriters. With the completion of this migration it is even more so, but perhaps more importantly is helping us to continue to fulfill our promise of sharing knowledge, and building trust. Jason Reynolds, Underwriting Resource Leader, Westfield Insurance Contact Us or call 800.444.4813 westfield insurance success story 4
999 18 th St Denver, CO, 80202 720.787.3950 Vertafore.com 2018 Vertafore, Inc. and its subsidiaries. All rights reserved. Trademarks contained herein are owned by Vertafore, Inc. This document is for informational purposes only. Vertafore makes no warranties, express or implied, with respect to the information provided here. Information and views expressed in this document may change without notice. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners. westfield insurance success story 5