PLICO created a task force to find the best solution. The group consisted of one user from every department. “We purposely left out all managers,” says Meares. “We wanted it to be decided by the users so we would have true buy-in. We know how important it is to have buy-in.”

The task force shared its wants and needs and then spent six months studying systems before narrowing the choices down to three. The three finalists made a presentation to the entire company, and all users–not just those on the task force–were allowed to vote for the system they wanted, relates Meares.

Two final choices then were turned over to management, where the final decision rested.

“We chose SSP because it gave us more freedom to bring up new lines,” says Meares. “If we decided to start tracking new data fields, we didn't have to go back to the vendor [for help].”

SSP also had an arrangement with Moore Stephens Business Solutions (recently purchased by Cover-All Technologies) for a business intelligence solution.

“The business intelligence was the big 'wow' for management,” recalls Meares. “For IT, the big 'wow' was the ability to manage [the solution] without going back to the vendor for help.”

One of the challenges for small carriers such as PLICO–with 50 employees–during a systems implementation is sparing business users during the testing phase. “To get the testing done, we had to get a key user from each department to help test, and after a while, that was difficult,” says Meares.

The next test was converting over the policies. PLICO has one giant renewal every year, notes Meares, with the majority of the carrier's policies renewed on an annual basis. “When we finally went live with the new system, we converted every policy. [Users] had to touch every policy,” she says. “We spent a lot of time with SSP making sure everything worked. As far as the conversion went, it was one of the cleanest I ever went through.”

PLICO users, for the most part, are happy, according to Meares. “Change is hard for anybody,” she says. “The processes have changed somewhat, and for some, it may have been easier doing things the old way.”

For example, she explains, PLICO offers third-party financing for its policies. “The process is much more complete and is a better way of handling it, but it takes a few more steps for the users,” she says.

On the plus side for the IT department is the way reinsurance now is presented. “In our legacy system, when you bought reinsurance, you paid by the limits,” says Meares. “Now, we have the reinsurance premium broken out by the limits, which never was available on the legacy system. That has saved eight to 12 hours for the IT department because we no longer have to run manual queries.”

In choosing SSP, Meares believes PLICO has a partner that will keep up with new technology. In that regard, the next step for the insurer is to offer options to brokers and policyholders on the Web.

“We want to get on the Internet for our insureds to do more things for their policy,” she says. “I would have had to build that from scratch, but SSP is building it, and SSP has its own overlay. That should help us to allow agents and insureds to do things on the Internet without me doing any of the programming.”

Meares anticipates that will be when the carrier begins to see a true return on its investment. “We did achieve cleaner data,” she says. “Doing the conversion, we put the policies out there and made sure they were all correct. We cleaned up a lot of data that way. We converted our open claims to the system, too, and attached them to the policies.”

One other benefit of the implementation was everyone got to know each other pretty well, and for PLICO, that turned out to be a good thing. “It was nice working with a group of people who were honest with us upfront,” says Meares.

Robert Regis Hyle

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