Hastings Mutual Insurance Company, a Midwest regional property and casualty insurance company, and Guidewire Software, a leading provider of solutions to property, liability, and workers' compensation insurers, today announced the full deployment of Guidewire ClaimCenter.
With the completion of the deployment, which began with a group of pilot users in early April, over one hundred claim handlers and processors are currently using Guidewire ClaimCenter for all claim transactions and activities. ClaimCenter supports all types of policies, including personal, commercial, and farm, for all claim types , including auto, property, casualty, and workers' compensation. From project initiation to first live production usage, the project was completed in less than eleven months.
"Our adjusters have been very positive about the introduction of Guidewire ClaimCenter," said Tom Chmiel, vice president of claims, Hastings Mutual. "They appreciate its highly intuitive user interface, which enables them to get work done more easily."
At Hastings Mutual, Guidewire ClaimCenter replaced a legacy, DOS-based claim handling system. The new system was completely tailored to Hastings Mutual's requirements during the implementation process, including:
Replication of all existing interfaces to the mainframe-based policy administration system and the check processing system, to ensure smooth processing of financial transactions.
Extension and configuration of the data model and screens.
Business rules to implement desired claim handling processes, including segmentation, assignment, default reserves, claim-specific work plans, escalations, and alerts.
Implementation of the organizational structure, including role-specific permissions and user-specific authority limits on both reserves and payments.
Transfer of all forms into ClaimCenter's correspondence generation module.
"ClaimCenter has been one of the most smooth and well-run implementation projects I have seen in my career," said Robert Eshelbrenner, vice president of information systems, Hastings Mutual. "Guidewire has set an example for how IT projects should be run."
Hastings Mutual deployed Guidewire ClaimCenter on the Apache Tomcat application server and the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database management system, both running on the Windows 2000 Server operating system. Both the application server and the database server run on HP servers with Intel processors.
"The success of the ClaimCenter deployment at Hastings Mutual is a testament to the partnership between our two companies and the close collaboration of our project teams," said John Raguin, chief executive officer, Guidewire Software. "We look forward to many years of working together with Hastings Mutual."