Designing a solution from within the context of a single product.

My previous blog post in this series detailed a serious property and casualty (P&C) administration “sin”: treating policy admin like unrelated business requirements.
Equally as damaging is sin #2: designing a solution from within the context of a single product.

Insurance products are not created equal. They carry different structures, data capture processes and workflows. It stands to reason that a PAS designed within the context of a single product will not easily accommodate the nuances of other products that are added at a later time.

As a way to control scope, it’s all too common, unfortunately, for carriers to focus the development of an entire policy administration solution on the needs of a core product. The assumption is that focusing on a single product will provide a base understanding for other products and reduce development time. As products are added, however, the problems with this “top-down” approach become apparent.

Wedging new products into unnatural paradigms creates costly inefficiencies for the development team and, in some cases, the end-user. Expensive coding, recoding and testing efforts are often required to provide an intuitive user interface, which prevents the carrier from leveraging the full capabilities afforded by the original design of the solution. The original goal of the whole initiative — architecting a flexible system capable of handling many different products — is quickly out of reach.

By contrast, the Sapiens software solution suite for P&C carriers approaches policy administration development from the bottom up. We start with the flexibility and adaptability needed for policy administration as a whole — rather than the specific needs of a single product — in mind. Such a broad-based approach makes the addition of products and functionality a simple matter of configuration that can often be accomplished in days or weeks — a far less expensive and time-consuming process.

When a system is architected to handle change — any change — from the very start, carriers gain the latitude to expand quickly and efficiently into new products and lines, without expanding their policy administration development efforts.

Stay tuned for sin #3 in this series.

For more information, check out my NEW white paper: The Seven Deadly Sins of P&C Policy Administration.

  • digital suite
  • digitalization
  • insurance
  • insurance software
  • insurers
  • policy administration system
  • policy administration system (PAS)
  • property and casualty
John Pettit

John Pettit John Pettit is the head of Sapiens’ North American P&C Insurance Platform, with nearly two decades of experience in the P&C insurance market. He previously served as the founder, CEO and president of Adaptik Corporation, a North American insurance software firm that was acquired by Sapiens.