CLIENT OVERVIEW
An innovator since their founding in 1921, Illinois-based Pekin Insurance provides a complete portfolio of personal and commercial insurance, including a full spectrum of P/C, health and life offerings. Pekin’s over 800 employees serve more than 900,000 policyholders in 21 states. With combined assets of $2 billion, Pekin supports a distribution network of 1,500 agencies and 8,500 independent agents
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Like many insurers offering workers’ compensation policies, Pekin became increasingly burdened by significant overhead costs, and faced associated regulatory compliance risks, resulting from mandated monthly unit statistical reporting (stat reporting).
In particular, Pekin is required to file stat reports with the National Council on Compensation Insurance (NCCI) and the Wisconsin Compensation Rating Bureau (WCRB). “Extracting the appropriate transaction data from our legacy core systems and reformatting it into the necessary bureau data feeds was a chronic headache,” explains Joan Hatler, Enterprise Data Steward. “Our data processing capabilities were increasingly insufficient, resulting in dedicating a staff member to manually verify and reconcile data records for about 60 hours a month.”
It was all so cumbersome that completing a data feed was typically delayed until just hours prior to the deadline, making stat reporting inherently stressful. “Plus, any hiccups meant other employees, such as commercial lines raters and actuaries, needed to take time away from their jobs to assist,” Hatler adds.
In addition, the existing system was unable to generate the data feed needed by Pekin’s claims department for filing workers’ comp subsequent report of injury forms (SROI reporting). As this is also a mandatory monthly task, nearly a day of staff time was dedicated to manually completing SROI forms.“Consequently, our company’s overall costs and regulatory risks grew with each monthly reporting period,” says Hatler.
SOLUTION OFFERED
As Pekin was undergoing a significant digital transformation across their landscape, including adopting the Guidewire core systems suite, the insurer sought a reporting solution that also integrated with their other new systems. “We turned to our strategic IT partner, ValueMomentum, to leverage their expertise and experience,” Hatler says.
The project began with an evaluation of existing processes and statutory requirements to determine the various types of data feed challenges. Then, ValueMomentum collaborated closely with Pekin to develop a plan to create an end-to-end process for automating stat and SROI reporting.
“We really appreciated ValueMomentum’s attention to detail throughout the process,” Hatler says. “Their development team posed insightful questions that helped us address a variety of concerns for creating an effective and intuitive solution that was easy to use.”
[“ValueMomentum’s] development team posed
insightful questions that helped us address a variety
of concerns for creating an effective and intuitive
solution that was easy to use.”
ValueMomentum engineered a solution to streamline and automate information extraction and data feed creation to meet NCCI and the WCRB specifications. This was accomplished with tools such as Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), IBM Rational, Microsoft Visual Studio and Atlassian Jira.
VALUE DELIVERED
With Pekin’s modernized solution, stat reporting data feeds take only about 30 minutes to create and are automatically generated 15-20 days prior to NCCI and WCRB due dates. In addition, vastly improved data quality, along with an intuitive business user interface, has slashed verification time to less than 16 hours per month.
“Previously, we needed to verify and reconcile about 40 percent of the records per month in order to create the NCCI and WCRB data feeds,” Hatler says. “That translated to about 50,000 records. Now, it’s less than 3 percent, or fewer than 4,000 records.”
Further, the data feed created by the new solution also contains the necessary SROI reporting information, eliminating the former manual claims task altogether.
As the new system enables multiple employees to refocus from tedious data support chores to higher-value businesscritical tasks, Pekin is realizing considerable net benefits. “We’re saving over $100,000 versus continuing with our former processes,” Hatler says.
“In addition, we’ve addressed a significant regulatory risk and relieved workplace stress,” she adds. “We’ve also gained a fully automated data process that will seamlessly integrate with our other modernized systems, as they go live. For us, the outcome is a tremendous success.”
