Frankenmuth Mutual Insurance Streamlines Claims with CSC's Exceed

With more than $400 million in direct written premium, Frankenmuth Mutual Insurance Company was looking to expand its base outside the Midwest by entering new markets in the Southeast and acquiring Patriot Insurance Company with operations in Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire. But to support its expansion, the company needed to modernize its systems.

“We’re one of those rare companies that believes in having one system, and we’ve had one policy administration system for the last 27 years,” said Louie Escamilla, Frankenmuth IT applications manager. “It was important for us to bring this newly acquired business into our environment, but it really didn’t make sense to move this onto our legacy system. We knew we needed to move to a new platform.”

Replacing Core Systems to Support Growth

Frankenmuth had been using CSC’s insurance software for personal and commercial lines for nearly three decades, so the company was interested in CSC’s Exceed®, a modern, Web-based product with support for the full enterprise.

Frankenmuth wanted a fully integrated system that could support all aspects of processing — policies, claims, billing, financials and commissions. The claims department was a critical area. The company, which manages about 40,000 claims a year with a staff of 90 adjusters and support personnel, had been running a heavily modified version of CSC’s claims system released in 1990.

It was no longer supported, and as Escamilla noted, “Whenever we upgraded our operating system, we always encountered a problem. We were always able to get through it, but we knew the handwriting was on the wall.”

Larry Miller, Frankenmuth Property & Casualty Claims manager, said the company considered nine different claims systems. “We narrowed it down to three systems and three vendors,” he said. “We looked at each claim system closely, did a cost benefit analysis and ultimately made the decision to go with Exceed Claims.”

Focusing on Claims Processing

The company worked with CSC on ways to use the system to streamline long-established processes. Historically, the workflow to get a notice of loss file to a claims adjuster took up to 60 steps, involving multiple handoffs between claims administration and supervisory staff. With Exceed Claims, the process was cut to fewer than 30 steps.

“Claims administration now only sees the loss once, it’s going right to a supervisor and then it’s getting immediately assigned to the adjuster,” said Matt Zielke, Frankenmuth’s project lead and a member of the adjuster team.

The company also used Exceed Media Management to simplify the process of accessing imaged claims correspondence. Adjusters can access all media from the claim file, rather than having to search in a central imaging folder. A new feature that applied required fields to document printing eliminated a major source of rework related to forms. A feature called dynamic entitlements allows the company to configure the system so that various users only see the fields they are authorized to see.

Spell check, something most PC users take for granted, helped the company ensure quality as it rolled out claims adjusters’ notes to the company’s 450 agents over a secure Web site. Agents now get up-to-date information about the status of claims.

“We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback from our agents, and our adjusters don’t have to take as many phone calls,” Zielke said.

Fully Integrated Future

The Exceed Claims project was so successful that the company decided in 2008 to take steps to evaluate replacing its core processing system with Exceed Policy, Billing, Management Information, Financial Integrator and Contracts & Commissions.

The company will be implementing the new Exceed (C.0) architecture, which allows users to accept updates to the system as they become available — instead of waiting on the next general release.

“Exceed really allows us to do things that we couldn’t even consider in the past,” he added. “We envision at some point in the future that someone will be able to walk into one of our agent’s offices, get a real-time decision on a homeowner’s policy and receive the declaration pages right on the spot.”

CSC’s long-term view of the industry is key. “CSC has been around a long time, and I can’t say that about other vendors,” Escamilla said. “We can depend on CSC to tap into the newer technologies and look to the future.”

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