CLIENT OVERVIEW

An innovator since its 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 Insurance’s over 800 employees serve more than 900,000 policyholders in 21 states. With combined assets $2 billion, Pekin Insurance supports a distribution network of 1,500 agencies and 10,000 independent agents.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

Pekin Insurance has been undergoing an enterprise-wide digital transformation project known as PIVOT (Pekin Insurance Virtual Overall Transformation) for almost a decade. The program was designed to meet Pekin’s desire for growth in the P/C market, and involved migrating their P/C lines of business from legacy systems to Guidewire. Pekin predicted the move would streamline internal workflows for improved efficiency, accelerate the development pipeline for delivering new products to market, and cut the cost of maintaining several independent legacy systems.

Pekin worked with its implementation partner, a major IT consulting firm, to roll out Auto and Deluxe Business Owners Policy in its first Guidewire release (R1) in 2017. Subsequent R2 and R3 releases—rolled out in 2018 and 2019 respectively—followed with the same partner for Workers’ Comp, Homeowners and Umbrella. While this partner worked on the rollout of R4 for Commercial Package Policy, Pekin wanted to add more manpower to the project to accelerate the completion of the Auto product line on Guidewire. In August 2019, Pekin turned to ValueMomentum, a vendor partner who has been supporting Pekin in other areas of the business, to lead the final R5 major phase of their Guidewire rollout. This phase included Motorcycle and Recreational Vehicle policies, which were to be migrated to Guidewire in conjunction with a major expansion of service into four new states.

Key factors in Pekin’s decision were ValueMomentum’s knowledge of Pekin’s tools and architecture, an open approach to collaboration, and ValueMomentum’s proven commitment to delivery excellence at cost efficiency.

SOLUTION OFFERED

The R5 rollout included end-to-end implementation of RV and Motorcycle policies, which currently accounts for approximately $5M in premium, on Guidewire PolicyCenter, BillingCenter, and ClaimsCenter. This entailed gathering the business requirements, converting each policy from the legacy system into Guidewire, and integrating them into Pekin’s software ecosystem, while simultaneously testing the new implementation. These phases were divided into work streams, which included project management, business analysis, development, configuration, integration, third-party integration, and rating.

Pekin collaborated closely with ValueMomentum and the vendor partner leading R4, especially through the development phase, since system codes had to be shared between the vendor teams. At the peak of development, the project team comprised approximately 29 onsite and offshore staff which included a project manager, technical architects, developers, and business analysts.

The project was rolled out successfully in 9 months, on time and under budget, with minimal to no defects to the code base. The focus on close collaboration among the vendor teams to deliver for Pekin’s specific needs, and the mutual understanding of Guidewire’s software ecosystem for future development were key factors of success. Commenting on ValueMomentum’s collaboration with both Pekin and the other vendor team, David Whitesell, AVP, IT and Guidewire Program Director at Pekin Insurance said, “You can’t tell if a person is a Pekin employee or a contractor from ValueMomentum because everyone worked as one team.”

“ValueMomentum really stepped up to the plate to lead this Guidewire R5 rollout project. They brought a great team, coordinated well with a competing vendor, helped develop the Guidewire expertise of the Pekin team and successfully delivered for Pekin.”

VALUE DELIVERED

With Motorcycle and RV now in Guidewire, Pekin can complete the last major phase of their much larger effort to migrate all P/C policies from their legacy systems. Now, policies can be written, issued, and renewed within a single environment that is automatically connected to billing and claims, allowing much greater flexibility and less room for human error than their legacy systems. This more efficient framework also facilitates rapid development of new products, enhancing Pekin’s ability to meet the demands of its customers with speed, for instance with new predictive modeling. On top of that, the overall cost of ownership has decreased, as Pekin replaced multiple outdated systems with Guidewire.

On the successful partnership with ValueMomentum, David Whitesell added, “ValueMomentum really stepped up to the plate to lead this Guidewire R5 rollout project. They brought a great team, coordinated well with a competing vendor, helped develop the Guidewire expertise of the Pekin team and successfully delivered for Pekin.” Going forward, Pekin will continue to lean on ValueMomentum for further stabilization as well as additional enhancements to their Guidewire systems.