SUA Insurance Company, a subsidiary of Specialty Underwriter’s Alliance, Inc., has brought one of its best-in-class partners to market with full policy management life cycle capabilities in 45 days. The partner, Minden, NV-based Flying Eagle, which underwrites commercial liability for the construction industry and roofing trade in ten states, was up and running quickly with a Web services-based EXAMPLE platform from Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Duck Creek Technologies.

SUA, which offers products through best-in-class specialty partner-agents that are selected through a rigorous vetting process, has made a commitment to bring its partners to market quickly. To honor its fast speed-to-market commitment to its partners the insurer partnered with Duck Creek in late 2005 with the goal of bringing every new partner to market within 60 days.

“Speed-to-market is a principle part of our business model,” says Barry Cordeiro, senior vice president and chief information officer with SUA. “The EXAMPLE Platform and the flexible architecture of the system has enabled us to accomplish that strategic objective.”

With the EXAMPLE Platform, SUA and Duck Creek collaboratively built a base carrier layer for lines of business specific to niche markets for contracting, trucking and roofing programs. The development of each new SUA program begins with this base layer, minimizing the development time to bring the new programs to market.

For Flying Eagle, which was announced as an SUA partner in March, the flexibility of the EXAMPLE Platform enabled SUA to build out the initial workflow to deliver the quoting process to Flying Eagle inside of three weeks while the rest of the application was completed – including underwriting, policy issuance and administration, and program specific customizations. Providing the ability to quote quickly offered Flying Eagle and SUA speed-to-market, which would not have been possible with a manual rating workflow. The final application was designed to allow Flying Eagle to complete its initial quotes without re-entry and without extensive training.

“I have heard every system promise – from artificial intelligence, to expert systems, to end-to-end agency management systems. These systems all seemed to cost double the budget, take twice as long, and deliver half of what was expected,” David Lambin, president of Flying Eagle, says, noting that the Duck Creek EXAMPLE platform was an exception. “The entire package and workflow is outstanding."