Using GlobeNet Technologies’ Firestorm Compensation system, Fireman’s Fund will revamp its agency administration, agency business planning and incentive compensation management, with the ultimate goal of boosting agent performance.

The new system will better centralize data, providing the company with easier access to information for measuring, rewarding and encouraging high performance among independent agents, said Marc Gallo, managing director with BearingPoint, which Fireman’s Fund tapped to both help select the system and integrate it into the company’s infrastructure.

“Fireman’s Fund has a wealth of data about agents, and this gives them better access, quicker access, and allows them to define requirements and store information in formats for better restructuring of data,” he said. “It’s a data driven solution, relying heavily on sophisticated SQL Server databases so Fireman’s Fund can take advantage of sophisticated data structures.”

In its role as an agency management and agency business planning tool, the system will help Fireman’s Fund identify trends in the market, and identify trends in particular areas or among particular agents’ customer bases.

“It helps determine the need for a particular insurance product and then during the planning process it helps answer the question ‘how do we get the message out to drive that behavior to sell more of that product?’” Gallo said. “The planning stage is basically, let’s take a look at what product has sold, and for 2006 we should be targeting these sales for personal, commercial and specialty marine,” he explained.

The system’s particular strength comes in its ability to use data to reward and drive success, he said.

“It has more strength around incentive compensation that most clients would probably need,” Gallo said. “It’s highly configurable, whether creating incentives for agents at an insurance company or real estate agencies, it can be configured for any type of incentive compensation environment. You don’t have to write any custom code, you can configure and test very easily.”

The type of data the system will manage includes current information on agents, their local goals, the type of products they are selling and their performance for the current year. But it also looks at agents’ pasts and futures – examining their past goals and past performance as well as their goals going forward.

“Not only do you get a current snapshot of an agent but you get their back history as well as a look into the future,” Gallo said.

Among other functionality that the system offers is the use of rich text tools so that when the company and an agency accept a contract as final, the system will automatically capture the metrics of that contract without the need for rekeying data from hard copy contracts, said Damian Kuolt, president and founder of GlobeNet Technologies. In addition, an “action tracking” feature keeps a workflow log of who has looked into an issue, what they have done on it and how the issue has been routed.

The company, which considers itself a Microsoft purist is in the process of fully migrating to .NET, which it expects will further ease integration and flexibility.

At this point BearingPoint is serving a systems integrator role with the implementation of the system, integrating it with the more than 80 other systems that it needs to access, and testing it and rolling it out.