So you’d like a streamlined technology solution that incorporates all your business processes, but the money isn’t there for it? Too often businesses think that technology is an all-or-nothing approach. Not so. If you consider a multi-year technology implementation plan, your business could see benefits before you’re able to adopt a full-scale solution.
Imagine investing in a technology solution that not only gives you a significant advantage in your market, but allows you to add and remove functionality and capacity as and when you see fit. That is a major advantage when you implement horizontally scalable technology, which allows you to expand on the base product’s capabilities. When you invest a technology solution that allows for such flexibility, you’re investing the ability to customize that product to adapt to your ever changing business needs.
These days the talk is about leveraging data to transform business. And it may be true that data has its place in the improvement of a company’s profitability. But data is static and its benefits to your company are limited. The real untapped source of success is information. Here’s why.
Your underwriting process is only as good as the data in front of you. That data has a shelf life, much like most data gathered in the research and benchmarking processes. The truth is businesses evolve and markets change constantly, sometimes quite rapidly. Today’s reports are current – well, today. Tomorrow could be another story as market factors, economic influences, and claims figures change.
All too often we see companies whose insurance technology solutions have left them with critical gaps in compliance. It’s easy to understand why. Handling ISO and NCCI compliance in one market can be challenging, but if you’re a multi-state operation, it quickly becomes unwieldy. With constant changes within the regulatory realm, maintaining adherence to bureau, state and federal regulations requires a full-time staff and full-time attention to detail. Often, companies will ensure paper compliance, but make missteps within their automated processes, causing efficiency to suffer.
True story: Once upon a time, a third part administrator hired an IT staff and tasked it with building a comprehensive system that automated and integrated all current TPA business functions. The goal: to consolidate customer data, field nurse case information, and claims processing information into one central repository. The product took six years to build and two years to test. By the time the system was launched, the TPA staff transitioned from one legacy system right into another. While the systems were indeed consolidated, the trouble of sending and receiving data from the company’s automated system to the clients’ newer, more efficient systems caused no end of IT woes and workflow interruptions.