How to Successfully Implement P&C Insurance Cloud Platform

Welcome to today’s webinar, How to Successfully Implement an Insurance Core Platform, an interview with Hartford Mutual Insurance Group. My name is Troy Mikulski. I’m the Vice President of professional services at Origami Risk, and I’ll be your host for today’s webinar. In twenty twenty two, Origami was pleased to announce Hartford Mutual Insurance Group selected our single instance, multi tenant SaaS claim solution. Over the past several months, we’ve been working on implementing the robust configuration required to support Hartford Mutual Insurance Group’s growing business needs, which just celebrated their one hundred and eightieth year of operation. Congratulations, Wayne, on that. Today I’ll be interviewing Wayne Gerhardt, Senior Vice President and Chief Claims Officer about the experience. Wayne has nearly thirty years of insurance industry experience and leads strategic initiatives and overall operations for Hartford Mutual Insurance Group. He also oversees information technology department and directs and executes the claims department strategies. Wayne, welcome today, and thanks for joining. Thank you, Troy. Glad to be here. Wayne Hartford Mutual Insurance Group’s scope for the initial release includes full claims life cycle support for ten lines of business across fourteen states and will be going live within fourteen months from the project inception. With that as a backdrop, let’s into the interview. Wayne, you have experience with large scale core transformation projects across your career. If you could talk to us a little bit about what you’ve drawn from those experiences, how they shaped your approach to Hartford Mutual Insurance Group’s implementation of origami, that’d be really helpful to our audience. Sure, Troy. Well, we all know that core system projects are expensive, they’re a drain on resources, and they’re time sensitive. And we’ve seen many of them in the industry, many be successful, but we’ve seen a lot more be fail for various reasons. And typically, you go back and look at some of those reasons why they’re not successful, it’s because one of those three factors. We felt like the key to success for us to get it right the first time with our overall vendor selection, with a product that really supports our strategies now and into the future. Wayne, when you say time sensitive, could you elaborate a little bit on that for the audience? Sure. So typically, in any IT organization, there’s always a backlog of work. And when you think about when your system gets the opportunity to be modernized, there’s somebody right behind you waiting to jump up next. And that time sensitivity is critically important to make sure that whoever’s up next gets the opportunity to go so they can continue to achieve their business goals as well. Now that’s really helpful. The other thing you mentioned was just needing to put your best people on it. It. So what did you have to do to prepare internally to enable that? Because obviously, you have a business to run coming out of COVID. Most organizations are running as lean as possible. So just talk to me a little bit about, you know, the steps you had to take to ensure you continue providing great service in your day to day operations while also preparing to put some of your best and brightest on the project. It all starts with communication and being very purposeful. If you think about a core system, when you do it right, it lasts a generation or two within a company. So most people in an organization have never experienced a project transformation. So it really takes time over and over again to really explain to your key people of the impact of this initiative, what role they need to play, how important that role is. You need to reduce their overall responsibility so they can focus on the core system. You’ve got to make it very clear to them that this is the most important item in your day. And if you can do those things repeatedly, it really allows you to put your best people on and get off to a great start. Thank you, Wayne. You know, what were some of the key elements you were looking for in a cloud based solution for your claim system? We were basically looking for a solution that would improve our employee experience, our agency experience, and our policyholder experience. Although we’re a small regional carrier, we still compete with all of the national carriers for new business and renewal business. So it really meant we have to have national carrier capabilities to continue to support our strategic growth plans. We also needed a solution that was going to be very it would minimize the support of our IT staff now and into the future. Again, we didn’t just modernize our claim system. We’ve modernized our policy. Now our claims and billing is up next. We really needed something that would minimize our support needs. Excellent. Thank you so much. Do you mind sharing a little bit about your vendor selection process and ultimately what led you to decide on Origami Risk? Absolutely. So we started by prioritizing our claims capabilities internally. What I mean by that was we went out and we met with every business unit and really talked about their next five years of growth plans and what capabilities would they need from the claims department to really help them achieve their goals. And from there, then we really focused on our vision of our strategic plan, which is really to be the regional carrier of choice for our policyholders and our agency partners. Once we got all that together, we really then identified a list of vendors in the industry that we felt might fit our needs. And we vetted that with Novarika. And Novarika is where we were first introduced to Origami Risk. From there, we just completed the routine RFP process to evaluate and ultimately select the solution. Excellent. Wayne, inception is the planning process at the front end of all of our implementations in a fairly industry standard approach. Know, from our perspective at Origami, key value that we see coming out of inception is alignment with our clients from the top of their organization, all the way down to the people that are gonna be boots on the ground on the projects and executing against that strategic vision, making sure we understand the key drivers and outcomes that we’re targeting through the project, and that ultimately we have alignment on scope, schedule, budget, resources needed to execute the project within the target schedule. And as importantly, what we won’t be doing as part of this phase of a project, but maybe a follow on project or a later phase of the implementation. From your perspective on the client side, what is the value that you see from the inception phase? From my perspective, the inception phase is probably the most important step of the process if you complete it correctly. And quite simply, we believe it provides the carrier and the vendor and the SI an opportunity to really validate the solution and deliver the capabilities needed by the carrier. If we went back earlier, so in my conversation, you know, you really have to vet and make sure this is lifetime play for most people. And you really need to make sure you get it right the first time. And the inception phase is that last step before you really invest time, resources, and money into replacing the legacy system. And it all starts and ends with the inception phase. We couldn’t agree more. Know, as you know, projects done well, inception has done well. And you know, if anything, you you identify through the process where you’re not aligned and it gives you that upfront opportunity rather than disrupting the in flight project to try to drive that alignment. Absolutely. What expectations did you have coming into the implementation process with Orgum, and kind of what preparations did you make internally as you started? Well, after the inception confirmed that Orgonomic Claims Solution was the correct choice for us, we were excited to move on. We had a high confidence level that we’d finish on time and within budget. The internal preparations included making sure we had our best people, like we just talked about, assigned to the project, and making sure that everyone understood what are about our goal of having an MVP product delivered on time. And that was the biggest piece in all the core systems I’ve ever been involved in. We always started with a tagline or a goal, You know, all new claims by fourteen, whatever that goal is. And that goal would always be the driving force to get you on time. And when people had to make key decisions, you could always go back to that goal. Is this decision going to impact our project goal or not? But it all starts with that goal and everybody being aligned to it. Thank you, Wayne. How would you describe the role of the system integrator kind of through the inception planning and also throughout the implementation? So I would describe the roles of the system integrator as really to play the middleman between the vendor and the carrier. And every vendor and every carrier, every employee within each company has not just this project, have requirements and responsibilities outside of this project. So the system integrator is really in place to keep all three parties online, headed to the same target, and making sure that we get to the decisions timely, people get the work done that’s needed, and you move forward. Without that system integrator in place, it allows, you know, companies like Hartford Mutual that are one hundred and eighty years old, sometimes they struggle making decisions timely. And a system integrator really gets in there and helps us stay on track and stay on budget. Thank you, Wayne. We couldn’t agree more. We highly recommend that our clients engage a system integrator partner to help with business advisory and kind of some of the pre setups, tasks, and things to think about in terms of target state operating model all the way through business decisions and best practices across the breadth of implementations that their firms have experience on. So if you’re thinking about doing an implementation and you don’t yet have an integration partner, we’d be happy to introduce you to several of the partners that we do business with, you know, and we also work with partners that clients may have a pre existing relationship with that they would like us to engage with on our initiatives moving forward. Yeah, in my experience, system integrators have always been key to any large core system replacement. I I agree. You know? And I I I think as you think about root cause behind, you know, failed projects that that we’ve talked about, you know, previously, in many cases, you know, you you may find that there wasn’t a system integrator involved. Agree. Wayne, with three parties coming together in Hartford Mutual Insurance Group, Origami and Ernst and Young, you know, to deliver ten lines of business in fourteen states, what were the key ingredients that enabled a successful outcome here? Like we mentioned, one of the key, you have to have that goal that everybody’s aligned to. It’s about your best people being assigned to the project, very clear about MVP, and then resolving those key decisions. So many times, these key decisions, people are struggle making decisions. You have to have people on these projects that can see the big picture, understand where the organization’s trying to go, understand how other systems fit and work together, and aren’t afraid to make a decision timely and move forward. And if you make the wrong decision, reset and you change and you start again, but you have to make decisions. When you don’t make decisions, everybody pauses and it immediately leads to not on time and not on budget. Wayne, I couldn’t agree more. And I know, you know, you were actively involved in this at a governance level, and there was a pretty thoughtful governance structure outlined during the inception phase of who would be making key decisions, you know, who’s involved in design authority around kind of the broader architecture as well as the application architecture that we would configure, and just, you know, any other business or technical decisions that needed made it across the different parties involved so. You know I would also advocate that you know the level of involvement of the key executive sponsor that that’s aligned from the client side is absolutely critical you fill that role wonderfully throughout the course of the project and made yourself available at all times, not just on monthly checkpoint meetings. That’s something I would also advocate for other clients is engagement through the initial decision on the vendor and kind of mobilizing the project don’t necessarily back all the way away. There is a need to stay engaged to support the team and at times drive the team. I agree, Troy. I mean, the role of the executive sponsor is to put the right people, select the product, put the right people in the right places, and then really get out of the way and only check back in when the team has a difficult decision that’s not going to, it’s going to impact time and budget. And if they’re, if time and budget’s not being impacted, you put the right people on the team, you let them make decisions, and you move forward. I mean, really, talking about the governments, that’s the most important aspect of the governance once a project starts. You want to give people the bandwidth to make decisions and move forward. Mean, only get involved from governments when you really need to make sure everything stays on track. Great advice. Thank you, Wayne. You know, scope creep is another real challenge can plague projects. So how do you balance speed to market and speed to value against trying to solve the perfect solution and have the fully complete perfect solution? Well, the first thing is everyone has to understand the difference between a want versus a need. And I have a sign in my office that a good friend gave me years ago to help me understand the difference between a want and a need. It says it’s a fine line, and it truly is. And in companies or projects that are successful, that fine line becomes very clear. And everybody in the project team understands what we need versus what we want. If we want it, it’s below the line. If we need it, it’s above the line, and we do everything we can do in our power to deliver that. But if it’s not needed for MVP or a specific capability that’s going to return a benefit to the user experience, the agent experience, or the policyholder experience, it has to be below the line, you’ve to keep pushing forward. So a good friend of mine taught me that lesson long ago, and I still have the sign in my office that I bring out anytime somebody’s having a hard time answering that question for me. You know, it’s not just applicable on projects. Think that’s a generally applicable statement in life. Sage advice. Thank you. You know, and and you Wayne, in your career, you know, as we’ve noted, you you’ve done, you know, at least three of these these core transformation projects across the course of your career. So, compared to previous experiences in your career, what are a few of the lessons that might just help others in the industry as they think about approaching these projects that we may not have covered in our conversation today? Yes, I think carriers really have to be realistic with themselves, what they can and can’t accomplish, what they really need to achieve their goals, truly what their value proposition in the industry is, and really only focus on those items. It kind of goes back to the want versus the need. But really, once you get that information figured out, then it goes back to the best people in the project, authority to make decisions, and trying to stick to the out of the box as much as you possibly can. I mean, the technology that’s out there today is far advanced from a process standpoint compared to when a lot of these a lot of our carriers put internal processes in place. These are much more advanced. You just have to be willing to take them and move forward. Now, that’s fantastic advice, Wayne. Wayne, a special thanks for being a part of our conversation today. I really appreciate you joining me and have enjoyed the conversation. I know that our audience will as well. For those interested in a deeper guide to the Origami approach for implementing P and C core insurance platform, you can find our recently released ebook at origamerisk dot com slash implementationguide. And if you’d like to learn more about Origami’s policy billing or claims core platform solution, including our multi tenant architecture and the related advantages, please visit us at origamirisk dot com slash insurance. Thank you for joining us again, Wayne, and have a great day. Thanks, Troy.