DMB Risk Solutions, LLC

Case Study #1:

Group Insurance Program

A group insurance program was providing property, general and auto liability insurance for over 100 members throughout the U.S.  The client allocates over $20M in total premiums for all lines of coverage.   New and renewal applications for each member were filled out by either the insurance broker or the insurance member utilizing an MS Excel spreadsheet. Different spreadsheets were used for prospective, renewal, casualty and property lines of business.  The spreadsheet allowed basic data entry, but did not qualify the information as it was entered.  This resulted in many follow up phone calls and emails to gather the information necessary to produce an accurate and competitive insurance quote. In order to perform an exposure analysis and allocation, the information was manually retyped into another spreadsheet.  Further, in order to produce the quote letters, it was necessary to individually type them for each member.   Finally, premium, taxes and fee charges were manually loaded into the client’s accounting system to generate an invoice for payment.  Not only was this process extremely time consuming, but prone to errors due to the large amount of manual manipulation required during the entire insurance renewal cycle.

Our consultants redesigned the insurance application methodology using the existing Microsoft Excel platform and incorporating VBA (Visual Basic for Applications).  Instead of using multiple spreadsheets and manual entry to gather disparate data, we developed a solution allowing the client to gather renewal, new business, property and casualty applications on the same electronic form.  Our solution has the ability to “error” check itself as it is completed, making the incoming data much more accurate and complete.  This led to a lot less manual follow-up by the client.   Along with the new form, we developed a small database application to pull the required data from the application form for further analysis and allocation purposes.   The database includes features to automatically create individual renewal quote letters in an Adobe PDF file, and forward the necessary data to the client’s accounting system (Peachtree) to generate member specific invoices.

The end result of these process improvements lead to significant reduction in work hours spent (measured in weeks) during the insurance renewal and quote and led to an increase in accuracy and competitiveness of the premium allocations. The client was able to postpone adding additional staff due to the success of the project.