One of the foundations of any productive partnership is trust. That is especially true when an insurance company selects a software vendor—particularly a vendor that will provide the platform that drives the carrier’s business.
Michele Stanhope, BTS vice president for AIX Group, believes that is what has made the partnership between her company and Cover-All Technologies such a success. “Anyone from Cover-All is available to us,” she says. “I see it as an extension of our internal IT team. We work that way. We’re just in different locations.”
AIX Group was formed in 2005 as a startup company. AIX leaders were looking to solve virtually every technology solution from a systems implementation perspective.
“We were looking for a policy issuance and rating platform, agency billing, a claims repository—because we use third-party administrators to handle our claims—reinsurance, underwriting rules, tracking of agency and program information, and a reporting solution,” says Stanhope. “Pretty much everything you can think of.”
The AIX team wanted an integrated solution, she relates. “We had a lot of insurance industry experience, so we knew what we didn’t want to do,” she says. “We needed to implement a systems platform from the ground up.”
The RFP process narrowed the choices down to three solutions. One of the larger vendors was eliminated because the insurer felt the vendor wouldn’t give a small customer the attention AIX wanted, according to Stanhope.
AIX also didn’t want to invest significantly at that point in technology resources. “We were looking for something we could have some control over and still leverage the vendor and its resources as needed,” says Stanhope.
Cover-All Technologies shared the AIX vision of having an integrated platform that could do many things—but not all things, notes Stanhope. “Reporting our program business and being able to customize [the products] are things we needed to do for every opportunity that came our way,” she says.
It took six months for AIX to select the final three vendors and ultimately choose Cover-All, at which time contract negotiations began.
From there, things went smoothly. Being a startup, integration was not an issue. AIX leveraged the Cover-All database administrator for the initial install, and a technical group in one of the AIX offices was trained in the operation.
One of the keys to the AIX/Cover-All relationship was the vendor offered a system that was Web based. “That was just a minimal requirement because we disseminate the system to our agents,” says Stanhope. “We also have an XML interface tool we can use with other partner vendors.”
AIX is happy with its choice, affirms Stanhope. “We are very entrepreneurial with rapid development and a lot of customization,” she says. “Cover-All has been able to support us, and it has done wonders for our business to support the kind of growth we’ve achieved. It’s a tough position to be in for a company to have to support such rapid change.”
The business users at AIX are happy with the solution, continues Stanhope, adding the latest release of the product has enabled AIX to produce more business in its workers’ comp line.
“The old workers’ comp platform had some navigation issues, and the new platform has solved that,” says Stanhope. “Navigation and usability now are among the best we’ve seen. We’re very encouraged with the new platform.”
In the last five years, although the Cover-All solution remained in place, circumstances have changed greatly at AIX. As the business began to grow, the company was acquired by The Hanover. However, “because we started as a small specialty insurer, the system fit really well,” says Stanhope. “We were able to have a smaller IT staff leverage Cover-All’s resources as needed—from an analyst to a developer perspective. Since we had such a high volume of program business, it fit our model very well from a capacity perspective.”
AIX also is anxious to get some of the new commercial package products on the new platform. The insurer meets regularly with its vendor to discuss planning for changes.
“We are in constant communication with [Cover-All],” says Stanhope. “We treat it as a partnership rather than a vendor/customer relationship. Cover-All is well aware of our business model and the issues we are seeing. We jointly came up with the things it needed to go after to solve our problems.”