Six years ago, Pioneer State Mutual went looking for a replacement for its policy management system. The Michigan insurer had reasonable goals in mind; it wanted to add automobile to its list of coverages, and to take care of a little thing called Y2K. The Heritage computer system it was using at the time couldn't handle Pioneer's auto needs and there was no one from the company to turn to for help-Heritage had gone out of business.
Other Heritage users told Gerald Dafoe, Pioneer's director of information systems, that some homemade upgrades were possible to handle auto coverage, but the company was on its own when it came to Y2K compliance. “It would have been difficult to add on to the old system, but possible,” Dafoe said. But after talking to other Heritage users who had made their own customizations, he became even more reluctant. “They told us the product was almost their own,” he said.
That was enough for Dafoe and Pioneer's officers to hear. They went shopping for new software and chose Allenbrook's Phoenix policy processing system. Was it a good decision? “We were about a $29 million company [net written premium] in 1995, and this year we'll hit $60 million,” Dafoe said. “Most of that is due to the automobile program we added.”
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