Two qualities for insurers that can never be disputed are flexibility and agility. Sometimes it means a new product needs to allow carriers to react to market changes instantly. Sometimes those market changes involve your partners.

Philadelphia Insurance Companies had to react to both of those market dynamics.

The main business challenges facing Philadelphia involved speed-to-market and allowing agents to do business online.

"In the past, the entire submission process (for agents) was paper-based," says Alfred Goxhaj, CIO for Philadelphia. "We had a good rating system in house, but there was a lot of manual work. We had to take submissions and enter the information ourselves, and then go back to the agents with a quote."

The system worked for large and complex policies, according to Goxhaj, but the underwriting rules that go with such large policies prevented the specialty lines carrier from adopting a self-service function for smaller policies.

"In the world of specialty products, you need to have a flexible, agile solution, be online based, and allows agents to do a lot of the work themselves," says Goxhaj. "We were looking for the next generation of policy admin system that could allow us to move faster and better into the market."

Goxhaj came across a PR announcement from a small software vendor named Harcase (now Sapiens) and gave them a call to learn more about their product, RapidSure. During the call, Goxhaj sat through what he thought would be a quick demo.

"I was glued to the screen for the next three hours," he says. "I couldn't believe how easy and flexible this tool is. It had everything I was looking for: solid architecture; it's based on standard platforms; it is componentized; and it integrates into other systems."

The RapidSure product was brought in for a full demo and this time the entire staff was wowed, according to Goxhaj. Harcase developed a pilot for Philadelphia and when asked to redo some functionality, The RapidSure developers did it within a week.

"That wowed us even more," says Goxhaj. "If someone could rework a major functionality that quick, that tells me a lot about their system."

Things don't always stay the same, though, particularly with small software developers. Harcase was purchased by Sapiens before Philadelphia could go live with RapidSure.

"It was very non-intrusive," says Goxhaj of the change in vendors. "[Sapiens] came and talked to us and wanted to know our level of commitment to the technology and the company. I told them the good and the bad and they were comfortable with that. Their conclusions were almost identical to ours."

The initial plan was not to bring in RapidSure as a replacement system, but rather as an alternative to what the carrier already had in place. Philadelphia had multiple policy systems; one the insurer developed on its own and two commercial products. The success of the Sapiens project is shown in that Philadelphia was able to replace two of the older systems—the internally developed one and one of the commercial systems.

"We shaved a lot of costs from not having to maintain all those systems," says Goxhaj. "Also, we can move quickly with new products."

Putting the first insurance products on the system initially was a challenge, according to Goxhaj.

"We didn't have all our processes in place, so we built a testing team and requirements gathering, analysis, and processes while we were doing the development," he says. "We were reinventing ourselves as an IT shop as we were doing development. We were transforming from a service-type IT shop to a software development shop. We had some turnover because we were replenishing skills, so it was a difficult period for us." 

Goxhaj attributes Philadelphia's success with the Sapiens product to the commitment both sides made to each other and the success of the project.

"We helped them every step of the way because they helped us," he says. "The way we managed everything also was important. If you don't know how to manage projects they fail. We went through this with an open mind and made it work, one way or another, just to find the best way to manage this process. It came with some pain, but we managed to create a good process for managing the processes and moving things forward."