Optimized P&C operations with Sapiens Stingray and dedicated team

Service offered: Dedicated IT Team and AWS Cloud Migration

Introduction

On-Premise Talent Delivery Model: Helping a leading property and casualty (P&C) insurance carrier significantly increase its efficiency while reducing operating costs.

Client Overview

Our Property & Casualty Insurance client is an insurance company that provides policies for homeowners, condo owners, renters, and businesses in Florida, Texas, and Louisiana. The Company was formed specifically with homeowners in mind. Its mission is to provide stable, comprehensive, and affordable insurance options to people living in catastrophe-prone areas. The Company has more than 100 years of insurance experience working in Florida and other storm-prone areas, successfully managing exposure to natural disasters. The Company has been assigned a Financial Stability Rating® of A, Exceptional, from Demotech, Inc.

Challenges

The insurer was challenged by increasing competition in the P&C market and saw a need to increase its efficiency, offer quicker solutions to its customers, and reduce costs. Their goal was to improve their billing processes to streamline commissions. They opted for Sapiens Stingray (then Maximum Processing), which is a modular, browser-based P&C solution for policy (quoting, rating, issuance), billing, claims, and reinsurance administration along with statistical bureau, DMV, imaging, credit card, general ledger, comparative raters, CLUE, 4SightBI, reporting, and many other third-party interfaces.

Deployed in 2015 by their internal IT team and a third-party vendor, Sapiens Stingray fell short as the implementation was unsuccessful.

The insurer continued to use the failed Stingray implementation and spent a considerable amount of time, money, and human resources (various dev teams) trying to fix the issues.
Additionally, they had various IT infrastructure and support needs that required around-the-clock maintenance and an ongoing IT project management structure. The data warehouse was hosted in a data center in Tampa. Network connectivity was spotty, and refreshes did not happen regularly or on schedule.

The P&C insurance domain for correct integration with processes and other systems.

Specific implementation and deployment expertise.

Technical working knowledge of the Stingray platform.

Lack of trust from other business units such as sales, finance, retail, etc.

Solution and Strategy

The Amzur team was brought in to fix and maintain Stingray. At the beginning, the Amzur team was composed of four information technology (IT) consultants and one project manager. Additionally, the team defined and documented the technical requirements. Amzur would stay on-premises and work with the clients to perform software configurations, technical analysis, and software development for complex integration, working with the business units and other third-party vendors.

Deliverables

Amzur’s team reimplemented and deployed the Sapiens Stingray.
Amzur suggested migrating the data warehouse to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and designing and implementing the automation for warehouse refreshes and reports using Python. The IT updates had to be done regularly to catch up with the ongoing demand and technical requirements, the third-party integration, and user requests, which halted operations across business units. While analyzing the needs of customers, the team discovered that the company’s reporting was poor. They could not access the data themselves and had to reach out to a software developer. The business as a whole did not receive the daily reports. The daily reports were generated by the software developer and then mailed to each business unit.

To improve process times, the Amzur team migrated, designed, and implemented a private cloud in AWS for the development and testing environment of Stingray. After troubleshooting, the team fixed the billing and commissions modules because the former was not working properly, resulting in faulty invoice amounts being mailed out and commissions not being paid on time. It took 80 staff hours to recalculate commissions and pay every month.

Methodology

The Amzur team designed and implemented an agile process for Sapiens Stingray as the property and casualty solution, featuring rapid development, implementation, and configuration. Previously, the company’s IT team used the waterfall methodology. They used Python to improve reporting functionalities, SQL and other systems in analyzing data extracts and interfacing projects, and data modeling and systems integration testing.

Benefits

Because the development team was previously utilizing waterfall methodology, it took two-to-three months on average for each release. Amzur initiated and implemented the agile methodology used today.

The Amzur team could optimize the release time to every two weeks. They continuously collaborated to improve the technical expertise of all platform users and taught the internal IT team to better understand the requirements of the P&C mandates and necessities. They improved and accelerated internal processes by 125%.

The Amzur team migrated, designed, and implemented a private cloud in AWS for the development and testing environment of Stingray. The move to AWS helped reduce the dev/test cycle from two days to two hours. Post-migration, business units could receive their reports by a specific time as required. After fixing the issues related to the billing and commission modules, the Amzur team could improve invoice management. The commissions are now viewed in near real-time.
The Amzur team members have been able to complete and provide successful results on the following projects for our P&C Insurance client:

Implemented a new line of business: Dwelling Fire Voluntary.

Designed and implemented integrations with third-party vendors (Solupay, IVANS, ISO, Lockbox, etc.).

Helped migrate AS400 from Texas to Florida and configure on the Florida network.

Migrated claims adjustment software (Lozano) from .Net 2 to .Net 4 and moved production assets to AWS from a third-party solution provider.

Migrated workloads (finance software, website, etc.) from on-premises/third-party provider (Datatek) to AWS.