This Month: Indiana Lumbermens Mutuals Peng Wong

Indiana Lumbermens Mutual (ILM, at www.ilmic.com), founded by a group of Indiana retail lumber dealers, issued its first policies on March 28, 1897. For over a century, ILM has been providing specialized insurance protection for the forest products and building material industry. It writes $64 million of premium in workers compensation, general and product liability, commercial automobile, surety bonding, employment practices liability, and umbrella liability.Technological advances and systems improvement throughout the years, coupled with seasoned expertise and accumulated knowledge in the industry, have provided ILM a competitive edge in efficiency and reduced expense ratios. But with a combined ratio of 103.5 in the third quarter of 2001, there is a strong emphasis on automation to further reduce expenses.In 1998, ILM converted from a mainframe environment (with several million lines of COBOL code) to a client-server system, hiring a consulting firm to develop a specialized solution that kept the legacy code intact. It sported an HTML front-end and SQL Server back-end. Realizing the potential use of newer technology with the client-server solution, in 2000 the company decided to automate the remaining lines of the business.Because ILM serves a highly specialized industry, most of the companys software is developed in-house. Thats nothing new to Peng Wong, ILMs director of information systems, who has worked in the IT field in various industries for the past 14 years.Wong earned both bachelors and masters degrees in computer science from Southern Illinois University. Starting as the manager of microsystems for Dart Transit and then USWest, he moved to Indiana to join Howard Sams as the VP of IT and then as CTO at Onex. He joined ILM in January 2001.Today, ILM has a totally Intel-based operation. Almost all its internal systems are home grown, and have been for years. For commercial auto, general liability, and workers compensation, ILMs older COBOL policy processing systems were adequate.What weve done is augment these systems with Visual Basic and [Active Server Pages], Wong said. Well use .NET and Web services to wrapper some of these older systems that are not in need of immediate change, so we can continue to use them in our newer environment. The applications will have the same seamless Web front end. The other two lines, property and liability, have already been re-written using Visual Basic.Wong gave one example of how ILMs use of Active Server Pages will improve workflow. In the past, when an insurance application comes in, it would go to underwriting; the company would immediately send out a loss-control field rep to survey the risk, write up a detailed report, and send it in with photos. The rep would take the film to an overnight developer, write up a detailed report while it was being processed, print the report, and send it in via FedEx. That whole process might take up to a week, while the agent and customer were waiting.The new system will be faster and more efficient. Switching to digital cameras was the first step; reps are now provided with high-speed Internet connections to transfer image files. The survey forms can be completed off-line and uploaded incrementally, and any information that reps need is more readily available. The system is scheduled to be implemented by the time you read this and will significantly reduce the wait time.ILM has developed and deployed a popular journaling system for every employee in the company. In the past, employees in each of the customer service departments took written notes, and these notes were then filed. When other employees needed information from those notes, they needed to retrieve them from filing cabinets.To make the information sharing more efficient, a new system, called ILM Notes, was created to store employees notes in electronic form using a simple interface. This allows customer support personnel to quickly access and take notes while serving customers, and then store the information in a database accessible to other employees. The ILM Notes system is available to every employee in the company, although theres a security system controlling who gets to see what; most employees have instant access to every note about each customer.In the first five months, users created over 23,000 notes. The ILM Notes system will be integrated into the companys new electronic document management system, which will also include the millions of older documentsit will take up to a year to scan them, at which point all available information in the company will be easily accessible to employees. As a bonus, this system will greatly enhance communication within the company.