After converting all the information to the new system, “we turned it on and it blew up,” said Mr. Smith.

What actually happened, he explained, was that the functions between the agency management system and the rating system were “very difficult to handle,” going through too many steps to get back and forth between the management and rating systems, taking more time to complete the work than the old system.

At the time, the agency was owned by a local bank. Mr. Smiths boss knew a programmer named Kerry Ferguson, president of Ferguson and Associates Inc., a technology consulting firm also located in Traverse City. Mr. Ferguson came in and did an analysis of the system.

He found that the integration between the rater and the Applied system was “very poor,” Mr. Ferguson said.

“The performance of the entire program was just very, very slow,” he explained, noting that it would take 60 to 90 seconds for a page to be drawn-up and “minutes” to transfer information between the two systems.

The more the two parties examined it, the more obvious it became that the only answer was to build a new system. Both Mr. Smith and Mr. Ferguson were convinced that it would be “one heck of a system,” Mr. Smith said. There were a few reasons for their positive outlook.

First, writing this type of system was nothing new to Mr. Ferguson, who had been in the insurance business on the programming side for 18 years and had already written boat and yacht rating systems.

Another reason was the relationship. The first programmer, Mr. Smith explained, “was pretty difficult to work with at times,” finding excuses for doing or not doing things related to the development. With the second programmer, he discovered how important it was to fully involve the agencys people with the programming people in developing the system.

Admitting he did not understand how deeply his employees would become involved, Mr. Smith said, “As it happened, it was a wonderful experience. It was fun, because we got to see fairly quickly what we wanted. And if it was not quite what we wanted or someone came up with a better idea, we went down that road [taking a different turn in developing the new rater].”

“I started in 1982 and this had to be the best, if not one of the best developments as far as relationships between our staff and Mikes staff,” said Mr. Ferguson. “If you think about it, it was a classical way to do it, because we spent the time classifying and reviewing what needed to be developed, and everyone was willing to put in the time needed to do it.

“Unlike other projects where other people have other things to do during the year and dont want to put more time in, people put the extra time in, and this worked out very well,” he continued. “And that was a major part that contributed to the success of it.”

After nine months of work, they developed Navigator, which Mr. Smith said, “does all we need but accounting. We saw it was immediately quicker.”

It proved easy and reliable at a critical time, May 1, 2000, which is the “peak of business,” said Mr. Smith, adding that the agency hadnt wanted to start running the system at that time. “But it ended up going very well,” at a cost of around $250,000, he said.

In that same year, the agency bought out its interest from the bank and went independent, taking Navigator with them, along with a partnering relationship with Ferguson Associates.

One key reason Navigator worked so well is that the developers saw that with about 50 different individual insurers with different rules and rates, it can become very complicated. Mr. Ferguson said he built a very generic system to look more like a spreadsheet, which makes working with it much easier.

“The key was to build a rating system where the agent puts in one entry and gets multiple quotes from the carriers,” said Mr. Ferguson. “Each producer controls what they see.”

Since going independent, Navigator has continued to improve and help expand the business. In March, the agency announced the release of QuoteCommand.com (NU Online News Service, March 5). The system is an online quoting vehicle for retail agents looking for boating insurance throughout the continuous United States (the agency does not have licenses in Alaska and Hawaii).

But, Mr. Ferguson said, the key to Navigator was having the people and commitment to allow for successful development.

“[Having all the people closely involved in the process] is one of the critical factors to success in any information technology project,” he noted.

Reproduced from National Underwriter Edition, July 14, 2003. Copyright 2003 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved. Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.