When evaluating modern policy administration systems, carriers must consider adaptability in addition to the traditional dimensions of functionality and technical fit. Adaptability is the measure of how well a system will support business and technical requirements that are not yet known.
But how do you measure adaptability? How do you determine whether an insurance system is truly adaptive?
At Adaptik Corporation, adaptability is a core tenant of our flagship product, the PolicyWriter policy administration solution. We know adaptability. In fact, we define adaptability. In our view, there are 12 characteristics all truly adaptive systems. Here, we share the fourth: adaptable reference information. Find the first three here, and check back often – the other eight are coming soon.
Policy administration systems make considerable use of information from reference entities – such as countries, states, counties, territories and writing companies. Therefore, these systems should be able provide a means to define new reference entities and relate them to one another easily through configuration.
An adaptive system not only enables users to quickly add a new reference entity, but also provides functionality to capture its attributes and relate the entity to another all through configuration.
Take the case where, according to an entirely new business requirement, the system needs to automatically determine whether to use the effective date or the processing date of a policy, depending on the laws of each state. With a traditional policy administration platform implementing this requirement could take months as the IT department implements a traditional development cycle to adjust the database, application code and production polices to react to this new element. However, an adaptive system, like PolicyWriter, can introduce such attributes immediately through built-in extensions.
An adaptive system not only enables users to quickly add a new reference entity, but also provides functionality to capture its attributes and relate the entity to another all through configuration. For example, an adaptive policy admin platform would enable the user to add a new entity named Territory, define its additional attributes – such as a special Code that is recognized by a downstream system – and relate the new Territory entity to the State entity all through configuration.
However an adaptive system does more than just provide you with the functionality to add and relate reference entities, it also gives you access to data – reference information – that resides in corporate databases. Not only preventing dual maintenance of information – such as ZIP+4 data, count of residence, etc. – but also saving carriers time and money.
When considering your next policy admin system don’t just take the vendors word that their system can handle these requirements, challenge them to show you how the system handles your complex business needs and you’ll be surprised at how few are truly adaptable to your needs.
