Buckeye Case Study

Insuresoft's Diamond Policy Processing System Shines Bright for Buckeye Insurance

What small company hasn’t found itself in Buckeye Insurance Group’s shoes? You get so caught up in the day-to-day operation of your business that you reach the point where your job is less about doing business and more about how you do business. For Chris Haines and the IT department at Buckeye, that meant spending their time keeping a legacy mainframe system—and a homegrown one at that—operating, instead of helping the company and its independent agents sell insurance policies.

Buckeye had spent 20 years enhancing the insurance software system, and its problems and limitations were becoming obvious. Haines, the P&C insurer’s manager of technical operations, said staffing (and turnover) was becoming a major issue. "We could not just take RPG programmers off the street, bring them in, and have them start maintaining this system," he said. "They needed to understand its inner workings. That only comes from experience and having your hands on the insurance software system."

From a creative standpoint, this was also hurting the IT department. Instead of luring new and talented workers with the promise of developing exciting ways to do business with its agency force (websites, agency interfaces, etc.), Haines and the staff were spending time and money on maintaining an old insurance software system. End-user training was another problem: The old insurance software system used
green screens, which meant the staff had to be trained to look closely for things such as coverage limits. Using temporary help was virtually impossible, because it took up to three months to train new personnel on the system.

Buckeye initially considered building a new policy processing system of its own, but personnel changes made that more of a stretch, according to Haines. There were starts and stops along the way, but by 1999 the company was ready for an outside solution and decided on the Diamond System. In September of 2000, Buckeye went live with Diamond 4.0. Within six months, data conversion for the personal-auto line was complete, and 10,000 policies were in the insurance software system. Haines said he was hoping to get roughly 75 percent of policy information from the data conversion, but instead got between 90 and 95 percent.

Converting to any property and casualty system has its rocky moments. "You have times when you’re holding a few policies waiting on a fix, but those are the exception, not the norm," Haines said. "The benefits greatly outweigh the stutter steps we had to take to get where we are."

Haines believes the system’s ability to do out-of-sequence endorsements and to view previous policy images are some of its biggest benefits. "With our previous system, every policy had one image. When changes were made, notes had to be taken to describe how the policy was changed, but you could never go back and look at the previous image," Haines said.

About Insuresoft:
Insurance software.Insuresoft is a Microsoft Gold-Certified independent software vendor delivering insurance software to the property and casualty insurance industry. Insuresoft offers a suite of products and services that are configured to meet the unique needs of insurance companies and managing general agents in North America. Insuresoft is a privately-held company headquartered in University Park, Illinois, with offices in Alabama and Minnesota. For additional information,
please visit http://www.insuresoft.com.