When Digital Equipment Corporation announced in 2000 that it would discontinue support for their VAX systems by 2007, George Hanrahan figured it was time for Western United Life Assurance (WULA) to look for a new policy administration system.

“Our system was an old COBOL system originally written for IBM and then converted to run on the VAX. The DEC announcement prompted us to look for a new administration package. Since we are Microsoft-centric with SQL Server and a client-server environment, we wanted our administration system to be on Microsoft too, if that was at all possible,” said Hanrahan, the company’s vice president and CIO. “Microsoft is more scalable, easier to integrate to and less expensive for trained people.”

The company started with a list of 20 vendors, and whittled that down to six with the help of consultants. It did five site visits and was just about to make a selection when AdminServer appeared with its new product.

“They offered us a test drive, so they took one of our products and put it up on their system in two days. That was pretty impressive. If all my projects went like that it would make decisions much easier,” said Hanrahan.

As the new company on the block, AdminServer didn’t have the financial stability that the carrier might have liked, but with a contract that provided access to the source Hanrahan figured he could keep the application running even if the company went away.

“We started in May 2002 with the test drive and in June 2003 we signed and started the implementation, which included four to six weeks of training. We went into production in June 2004,” he said.

Once AdminServer was running, WULA placed all new policies on the system and began using its flexible design to launch any new products.

“Since June ’04 we service all new immediate products on AdminServer. We have two groups of annuities – immediate and deferred. We then started building our deferred product with ability to do illustrations and direct policy prints out of the system,” Hanrahan said. “These will go into production at the end of January. Beginning in February we are migrating to their latest version, which is just a matter of bringing the code up and testing to make sure nothing is broken. Once that is complete, we will do the conversion of 80,000-plus policies that we still have on the old system.”

The carrier has integrated AdminServer to its general ledger, centralized accounts payable and Patriot Manager, which “looks at the information to make sure none of the customers getting annuities are terrorists,” Hanrahan explained.

“We have eight or nine systems integrated with AdminServer, including our data warehouse for metrics and data mining. The integration is relatively easy because the Microsoft products that fit on top of it are highly integratable. We can pull the data sources into Word or Excel and do letters from there, which cuts down on the amount of time IT has to be involved,” he said.

With the Microsoft-based AdminServer system, the company’s business people can do most of the work to create new product.

“Once you set up a base product you can clone it, making an entirely new product and make the changes that are unique to the new product. AdminServer has the database and rules engine very well integrated into the system. We have the business analysts in our IT group, and they work in conjunction with the users to make sure the testing is done in a pre-defined fashion and then they bring it live. With AdminServer we have the capability to go after new opportunities much faster and bring new products to market sooner,” he added. “With the old legacy COBOL systems, you would have to go in and do hard coding for specific items in the policy and that could take from a few weeks up to six months. Here we can develop a new product in a day or so and roll it out after one or two weeks of testing.”

The company’s IT staff has shrunk from 74 to 27, some of it through business initiatives, but a lot through the efficiencies of a Microsoft platform, he added.

“We are using Microsoft as the base for a lot of what we are doing, plus we build less, buy more, and then do the integration.”

WULA offers its AdminServer functionality to agents through its Web site.

“The agents can go in and look at their clients; they can use the Web to manage their client lists right out of the system, and they can check policy values and download information. Our mantra is customer service, and the agent is our customer,” said Hanrahan.

Training users on a Microsoft-based application is highly efficient, said Hanrahan.

“If you know most of the Microsoft methodology you can get in and point and click your way through the application. You can figure it out, and you don’t have to memorize transaction codes. It’s pretty blatantly obvious,” he said.

He is clearly pleased with his results.

“I have been around the business some 30-odd years, and George’s rule is ‘Never trust a vendor.’ This is the first case where that was proven wrong,” he said. “AdminServer as a vendor has over-delivered. They met or beat all their time frames. They are just excellent folks to work with.”

www.adminserver.com

www.wula.com