FULFILLING THE TECHNOLOGY PROMISE

Rough Notes, Nov 2004 by Bates, Virginia M

Agency Systems chose Pervasive as its database provider. "Whereas you almost need a Microsoft-certified engineer to reindex data files, there are virtually no maintenance routines with Pervasive," explains Hunter. It is a self-tuning database. Pervasive, also based in Texas, is used by many large enterprises, including Aegon Equity Group and MCI.

Agency Systems decided against incorporating Word into its system. Instead, Agency Systems uses a memo-writer that works a lot like Word according to Hunter. "With Word, everybody in the agency has to be on the same version of Windows 98, XP, etc.; plus Word takes so much more memory and can crank so slowly that we decided there was a better way," he explains. Using Agency Systems, Bonnie Campa of The Independent Insurance Center in San Antonio, Texas, has set up and saved lots of letter templates that the agency has used in the past. She reports that she never could figure out how to save them as templates in the more complicated agency management system the agency used to have.

"Our system doesn't include fancy tools like spreadsheets (which can be useful to an agency), but our tools cover most agency uses and are easy to use," says Hunter. Many agencies like to use spreadsheets to track properties, schedules, or the status of responses in the marketing/placement process. This is still possible in Agency Systems by using stand-alone Word or Excel and attaching the document to the Agency Systems client.

Workflow considerations

Data integration within the system is not as robust as in some other systems. For instance, an ACORD change form can be completed and does create an automatic activity (without specific change detail which can be hand-typed into the activity), but the coverage detail screens have to be updated by hand. A change confirmation letter can be chosen from the document list, but it can't be a "hands-free" automatic result of doing the change. Proposals can be integrated into the system as merge-documents so that client information will prefill the proposal fields, but policy detail will not. Pleasantly, certain fields, like property values, add up on the fly as field entries are input. When text is too long to fit into a field, the font size is subtly reduced to make it fit. This last feature is very convenient for service look-ups but may be thorny when data mapping is done to facilitate upload to carriers, who define their field lengths by ACORD standards.

Submissions to carriers can include scanned images of loss runs, financial statements, or photos bundled electronically with applications created in Agency Systems. After creating the batch, the user must select a transmission option: print, fax, or e-mail. If the user selects "e-mail" and a carrier is indicated, the system will go to the Company Profile for the appropriate e-mail address. If the user hasn't set up the Company Profile section of the system, the user can either set it up on the fly or can send the submission to him or herself in order to copy it to each relevant carrier. (The user could send it to the first carrier and copy to the others, but most agencies would like each carrier to get an original submission without indicating which other carriers are being approached.)