When the Auto Club Group out of Dearborn, Mich., made the decision to add and update specialty lines to its book of business, company management felt it was important to find a modern platform to process the business rather than trying to incorporate it onto the legacy system it was using for its personal lines business.

"We were looking for an avenue to launch some cutting-edge products," says Anthony Ptasznik, vice president, product management for the Auto Club Group. "Our plan was to introduce innovative specialty lines products in Michigan and then roll it out in our other markets."

The traditional challenge for virtually all new products is speed to market and Auto Club Group is no different.

"We were looking for rapid development and lower cost of ownership and those factors challenge traditional legacy systems," says Brent Stahlheber, senior vice president and CIO for Auto Club Group.

In researching the best-in-class products on the market, Ptasznik felt it was important to determine how the solutions were evaluating the risk and what product features they were providing. The system also had to integrate with the existing policy system.

"We didn't want to have to rekey the data we already had," says Ptasznik. "If we were going to go through a different platform it had to be seamless for the user. They had to feel like they were working in the same environment."

Stahlheber wanted a system that would offer a breakthrough in the group's technology platform that could implement seamlessly and integrate much easier than had been done in the past.

Stahlheber also wanted to avoid interfering with the legacy systems.

"When you make a change to some of these legacy systems it impacts so many things," he says.

Auto Club Group was introduced to CodeObjects through a former employee. As ACG began to investigate the solution provider the technology reviews of the CodeObjects platform were strong. Auto Club Group found that the new policy system was not completely built and tested, but after looking into what CodeObjects offered, the carrier decided to partner with the vendor in a shared risk.

"It was atypical of the way you normally go out and purchase a product," Stahlheber says. "We both put some resources into it and worked together in a much-different structure than normal."

On the back end, the biggest challenge for the insurer has been the difference in the new platform from the legacy system the Auto Club Group's IT staff has used in the past.

"We have resources that are at the level to understand how to potentially maintain the system," says Stahlheber. "We spent some time trying to get the limited resources that CodeObjects has to spend some time with our Java developers to transition a lot of that work. We've been reliant on CodeObjects to do the changes, so it hasn't been seamless from a Java development perspective."

The biggest issue the carrier has run into involves wanting to customize the platform to exactly meet their needs. Taking a canned product and making changes in it takes a great amount of time and effort and Stahlheber maintains making the changes was challenging.

On the business side, Ptasznik explains Auto Club Group created a batch system out of real-time system.

"The [CodeObjects] product is modern and it expects you to recognize payments in real time," he says. "But all the rest of the stuff we do is in batch. We had to make some significant modifications to get it to play in our world."

"We took a software package and tried to customize it to meet our needs," says Stahlheber. "They have a small team of people. They initially underestimated the size of the initiative. When they put resources on it they are extremely fast, but fighting for the resources can be an issue. They are still a small company."

So far it has been a success story for the carrier. "We rolled out a motorcycle/off-road product in our four largest markets very quickly and all the channels are fine with it," says Ptasznik.

"When you look at it from a technical perspective we did this in nine months." says Stahlheber. "That's kind of unheard of. That's where we saw the real power of this platform."