Paul Calvet, the companys senior vice president and CIO, has spent his entire career in exactly that niche. After getting a business degree from USC, Calvet joined Dallas-based Republic Insurance Company in 1980. At the time, Republic was one of the biggest writers of lender-affiliated business, and Calvet spent seven years there, mostly in the marketing area. He joined WMIC in 1987, originally in marketing but working with the IT department, and took over the systems department in early 1990.

Hisand WMICs specialty has been heavily automated for years. Back in the early 80s, WMIC was letting its agents quote and issue interactively. Then it was using an IBM System 38, with 5250 terminals in agents offices tied in with leased lines. The agency CSR had to go to a specific terminal to transact business. Today, the systems been upgraded to an AS/400, and any CSR can operate from their own desk, using terminal emulation software while still having full access to all of that agencys WMIC records.

The coverage is so specialized, in fact, that WMIC has custom-written almost all its own line-of-business applications (except for accounting and word processing). Calvet credits two key programmers who together have about 50 years of programming experience. Because of their experience, Calvet said, weve been able to internalize all our own development.

So, what kinds of things do you do, when youve been doing what youre doing for so long? Incremental improvements in the system. For example, WMIC has been doing document imaging for years. All its images are currently on a server with six gigabytes of storage, and its historical images (approaching 100 GB) are stored on 40-GB drives as part of a jukebox. It doesnt matter how many images are served up quickly, Calvet says, users are going to complain about the occasional historical image that isnt. So the company is moving to a new system that will have a 380-GB drive, with all images available instantly. Its also moving from a single-processor Pentium server to a dual-processor Pentium 4 machine.

Its going to bring more improvements out of the change, too. All the companys internal workflow programming is done in a Lotus Notes and Domino environment. Currently, all the links to its imaging database use OLE, with an average size of about 17 K. The new imaging environment uses a technology called WebArchive and supports URL links, which average less than 2K each. That 15K difference doesnt sound like much, but the companys system has so many imaging links that it will dramatically reduce the size of its Lotus Notes databases, with resulting increases in speed.

WMIC s latest automation foray is into direct writing over the Web. Although it isnt well known to the public, the company has both a strong financial rating (A-) and highly competitive rates, so its added the public access to its Web site for quoting and ordering homeowners insurance. The hard part, of course, is to get the public to actually find the site, so its starting to drive traffic with a direct-mail campaign. This new segment of the business is already starting to grow.

Calvet says that, at WMIC, Automation is the straw that stirs the drink. He credits WMICs CEO, Joe Crail, whose basic attitude is Why cant we automate? rather than Why should we automate?, for driving all its automation efforts.

Lee Russell
Southern Family Insurance Company

When you start a company from scratch, you need to start your systems from scratch, too.

Takeout, to most people, conjures up images of tasty Chinese food in paper cartons with folding tops and metal handles. In Florida, though, theres another kind of takeout.

After a number of years of mounting insurance losses, the worst of which was Hurricane Andrew in 1992, the insurance climate in Florida had deteriorated. As the number of insurance carriers in the state dwindled, more and more policies ended up in the Florida Residential Property & Casualty Joint Underwriting Authority (the JUA). Its the market of last resort, and the number of policies was increasing to an alarming amount. So in 1995, Florida insurance commissioner Bill Nelson, working with the state legislature, came up with a plan to depopulate the JUA. To encourage the return of private carriers (or the creation of new ones), it would pay a cash incentive for each policy removed from the plan, and a three-year exemption from both JUA and Florida Windstorm Underwriting Association assessments.

Former Tampa mayor and long-time Florida insurance exec William Poe, Sr. was one who stepped forward to accept the challenge. He formed Southern Family Insurance Company, which started by assuming 74,000 policies from the JUA. In Southern Familys case, it started by servicing the existing policies as of the assumption date, and writing new policies as the old ones expired.

In January 2001, it acquired another insurance company, Atlantic Preferred, adding more premium and policies. (Both insurance companies are now part of the Poe Financial Group holding company, which also owns some related insurance operations.)

Lee Russell is vice president of information technology for all of Poe Financial Group. Ironically, Russell started his career as a COBOL programmer working for another Poe company, Poe & Associates. He moved on to other positions, going over to the banking and financial services side. He found himself working with Bill Poe again in 1997, this time as an IT consultant as the new company was being formed. After it was operational, all the policy processing was outsourced to PMSC, and Russell moved on to another project. But in 1998, Southern Family decided to bring the processing inside, and Russell returned as a full-time employeeone of only two IT folksin the position he holds today.

We started small, Russell says of his staff, adding one person every six or seven months, as the company grew. Today, the IT staff numbers 10 out of a company total of 120.

The first order of business was to choose a policy processing system. We looked at a number of them, but we chose Allenbrook primarily because it was the only one willing to commit to a very tight delivery timetable, Russell said. In answer to the inevitable follow-up question: Yes, they delivered on time.

Allenbrooks Phoenix system is based on Microsoft SQL Server, running on an NT platform, so Russells team set up a Citrix server farm to extend it out to the companys 150 agencies. Our agents can quote directly off the Phoenix system, he explains, and they can even issue, if it fits all the underwriting parameters. They can also do billing inquiry.

The company has outgrown its space; its claims operation has moved to a separate office 10 miles away. Remote claims adjusters, who live and work around the state of Florida, use Citrix to run Phoenix as if they were sitting in the home office. More recently, the company had one customer service employee and one financial employee go on maternity leave, and the system allowed them to work part-time from home.

It really helps us keep trained people on staff, Russell explained. He even has one of his own staff using it. A key programmer with a unique set of skills re-located to San Francisco, but was able to stay on staff by telecommuting. Theres even a video conferencing system set up, so company employees can sit down and discuss problems, issues, and potential system changes with him.

Southern Family has grown to about 117,000 policies and $100 million in premium, and about a third of that is a growing book of commercial business. Russells keeping busy, too. The company implemented an integrated RightFax systema great efficiency creatora couple of years ago. Now its implementing an ImageRight imaging system, with the first department (customer service) having just gone live. Russell is already pleased with the way that implementation is going; hell be rolling it out to the other departments in one-month intervals.