"Our goal is to be the easiest insurance carrier with which to do business. Independent agents have a choice of carriers, and systems like the new agent portal give us an edge in the market. iRise helped us get a mission-critical system to market on time, ensuring it can be successfully adopted by a broad range of users from day one."

– Line of Business Owner, P&C Carrier

Background
This customer, a member of global alliance group, is a commercial business, personal and specialty insurance provider with 61 offices in 26 states, over 4,000 employees and more than $11B in assets. Like many companies, the vast majority of the IT budget at the customer (85%) was devoted to maintenance and support activities, leaving little room for the delivery of innovative new applications.

Challenge
Independent agents were forced to traverse three unique Web sites for critical business information each with its own login, navigation and layout, making it confusing and time consuming to do business with the customer. But before the company could deliver improved systems, it had to overhaul its IT priorities and free up the necessary budget to launch new systems. The customer needed a solution that would enable IT to outsource maintenance and development in order to shift more resources to projects that drive innovation for business success.

Result
The customer turned to iRise simulations to substantially reduce the time IT spends getting the right business applications to market. IT now previews iRise simulations with line-of-business owners and end users before writing a single line of code. The simulations are used as an accurate, low risk communications vehicle for their outsourcing partners, enabling lower cost, on-time delivery of business critical applications; for example, a new agent portal, which aggregates disparate content from multiple sites into one destination. With the new agent portal in place and a single sign-on capability, agents can now access content and functionality from one location. Likewise, agent-facing employees, who have different information needs and priorities, have their own view into the same system.

Four weeks after the launch of the agent portal to thousands of independent agents across the country, the customer recorded nearly 100% adoption, with less than 5% of incoming help desk calls related to usability of the new application. Furthermore, IT now devotes 60% of its budget to new projects – a dramatic turnaround in budget allocation.