Case Study: Barnstable County Mutual Insurance Company

Company Name: Barnstable County Mutual Insurance Company
Area of Technology Initiative: Business Process Management – Print and Mail Fulfillment
Industry: Property and Casualty Insurance
Year that Initiative went live: January 2013

 

Overview of Company/Organization/Products/Lines of Business Involved:

Barnstable County Mutual is an insurance company serving homeowners on Cape Cod Massachusetts.  Barnstable sells homeowners, dwelling fire and personal liability insurance exclusively through twenty-four independent agents on Cape Cod and the South Coast of Massachusetts. The Company has approximately 18,000 policies in force and maintains an A.M.Best rating of A (Excellent) for its strong financial position.

This project had a significant impact on the company’s operations across all lines of business including all forms for Homeowners, Dwelling Fire and Personal Liability policies.

Brief description of initiative:

John DeMello, Barnstable’s CEO, engaged with MassPrinting in early 2012.   Barnstable was handling all printing and mailing in-house for new business, renewals and endorsements (excluded invoices).  In addition, Barnstable had people manually quality controlling the paper documents.

One key objective was to have little to no development requirement for Barnstable’s PAS system. The project had several other business drivers:

  1. Improve existing workflow for manual and/or inefficient processes
    • Reduction in staff time spent on non-value added activities (printing, mailing, etc.).
    • On-line underwriting review and approval of documents prior to print/mail.
    • Policy document management (pulls) mid-process.
    • Mailing direct to policyholder.  Agent opt-in/opt-out for mailing documents.
  2. Technology enhancements
    • Fully integrated and automated, end to end policy document distribution.  PAS document creation through mailing to Policyholder.
    • 2D barcoding to insure 100% integrity in the envelope.
    • Table driven agent mailing model to allow for flexibility and options for mailing to Policyholders.
    • Different mailing model for new business versus renewals/amendments.
    • Add in base policy forms when required.
    • Dashboard of management reports
  3. Additional Enhancements
    • Added static “Welcome Letter” message to all mailings.

Added Agent Name and contact information (specific to policy) to address page.

Today, Barnstable has seven employees with access to the print an output solutions platform for daily operational use.

Quantitative success metrics (productivity enhancements, cost reductions, etc):

By focusing on the automation of printing and mailing, Barnstable experienced a cost reduction driven by less materials needed for printing, the ability to leverage leading edge transaction processing and the elimination of manual processes which are now handled by the technology behind Barnstable’s new document distribution process. Additionally, Barnstable was able to realize additional cost savings by no longer having full-time employees spend time on printing and mailing and increased straight-through processing (STP) for agents.

Other non-quantified results:

This project has already delivered operational improvements ranging from improved document delivery (through the implementation of 2D barcodes for document/envelope integrity and address cleansing), management reporting via dashboards and adding custom messaging on customer correspondence. Further, by leveraging existing applications and solutions, as well as cloud technologies available through MassPrinting, Barnstable successfully limited the impact on their internal applications and resources while improving communication with both agents and policyholders.

In addition, this document management solution offers Barnstable a fully operational Disaster Recovery plan for all document distribution which is something they did not have in place with their current internal operation.

Customer impact and business model changes that resulted from this project:

Through this strategic initiative, Barnstable has added increased operational flexibility while also improving the quality of customer communications.  Document distribution is often viewed as a cost of doing business but Barnstable was able to make improvements in their document delivery and printing process that extend document management capabilities beyond the limitations of the company’s PAS system.  With the ability to add content and/or change the format of customer communications, Barnstable has turned document distribution into a competitive advantage, not just a cost of doing business.