Other agents primarily operated their office without an agency management system. We already had developed a system for the agents who did not have management systems, and that was a product called GAINWeb, our Web-based system that does quoting, issuing, and policy maintenance over the Internet, explains Carter. A large group of our agents had management systems, and those agents wanted to do all their work out of the management system. Thats what started the bridge process.
Grange began developing the bridge in 2004. Total development took approximately nine months to complete, including testing and implementation. The Grange development team consisted of five peopletwo developers and three testers.

The system supports the quoting, issuing, and policy changes that the agents have. It helps them manage their book of business by providing a seamless interface between the management system and the Grange system, notes Carter. He adds the bridge works with all the major agency management systems and with all the comparative rating systems. The one thing that makes it stand out is we not only do the quoting and the issuing of new business, but we also do policy changes by way of this bridge, which has been a real breakthrough for us because thats the vast majority of transactions we do today, he says.

Grange plans to expand the bridge to offer additional items, including first notice of loss. Were also looking at an alert system that will work through this bridge process, continues Carter. The agents have the ability to do their quotes and policy management and in addition, through the bridge system, can do any kind of inquiry process. For example, if they are looking at a policy on their AMS management system, they can hit one key and get a complete policy statusupdate, billing, payment historydirectly out of our system with one keystroke.
SIS creates a unique, encrypted Web-Link setup for carriers to be distributed to their agencies. With one click from SEMCI Partner, users are able to see whether clients checks were received on their policies or submit an endorsement request. The list of features grows as carriers add functionality to their Web sites.

Many of the Grange agents use the SIS system, so when the carrier developed the bridge, Carter says the plan was to interface with SIS and any of the management systems. Today we work with Applied through Transformation Station, and we work with AMS and SIS directly over the Internet, he says. Interfacing with the management systems is different but not difficult. They each have a different mouse-click or a drop-down menu that initiates the bridging.

Carter reports Granges previous method of transferring data through agency management system batch upload had a new-business error rate of 30 percent. The error rate was high because we could not edit the input at the desktop point of entry, he states. Now, with our new bridging solution, our new-business error rate is less than 0.5 percent because of our real-time desktop edit capabilities.

The reason agents like the Grange bridge and the carriers other Web-based products, Carter believes, is because Grange uses an agent-centric design approach. That means we went out and talked to the agents, he says. We formed focus groups and discovered there were really three distinct audiences we were looking at when we went into this development phase. We looked at the owners of the agency principals as being one audience group, we looked at the producer as the second group, and finally we looked at the CSR. They each had a different need, and we looked at each of those needs and tried to address them in the products we produced and made available to them under our Grange Agentware umbrella.