Application

COLD for Reinsurance Industry

Customer Profile

NAC Reinsurance Corporation (NAC Re) offers specialized, reinsurance solutions to property and casualty insurers.  Reinsurers provide insurance protection against large losses and risk exposure to primary insurers. With more than $600 million in premiums and surplus, NAC Re ranks as one of the leading
reinsurers in the US. Since its inception ten years ago, the company has grown rapidly. Headquartered in Greenwich, Connecticut, NAC Re is expanding internationally through its London-based subsidiary, which provides reinsurance throughout the world.

Problem

NAC Re relies on a core reinsurance computer application for maintaining its financial history data and reporting. This system generates more than 250 reports that have accumulated information spanning the company’s ten-year history. The finance, actuarial, and underwriting departments rely heavily on these reports for financial analysis and decision making. As the company has grown, the process of printing, copying, and distributing these reports became cumbersome and lacked
flexibility. For example, one widely-used report is 6,000 pages and includes all of NAC Re’s contract and financial data since the company’s inception. Whenever accounting professionals needed to use small sections of the report, it was necessary to print the entire report to access the updated information.

NAC Re needed a better way to store and distribute computer-generated reports, allow on-line access, and give users the flexibility to sort through the reports and get right to the information needed. Its objective was to significantly reduce the effort, cost, and inefficiency involved in producing, storing, and accessing paper documents. The answer was COLD (Computer Output to Laser Disk) software.

The FileNET Solution

Because NAC Re adheres closely to open-system architecture principles, all new software applications must support OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) or ODBC (Open DataBase Connectivity) and use non-proprietary data bases to allow integration with other desktop software. After evaluating several software products, NAC Re chose FileNET’s Greenbar COLD software. In June 1996 Greenbar was implemented for storage and viewing of financial and business reports. Greenbar was the only solution that had an open-system architecture and met all the requirements of NAC Re. In addition to easy access and its flexible user interface, Greenbar offers a non-proprietary SQL database, Microsoft NT Server operating environment, and fully supports Microsoft Object Linking and Embedding (OLE 2.0).

"In our evaluations, we saw that the Greenbar product had all of the functionality we needed in a COLD application and it was the only product that offered an open-system architecture. With a standard SQL database, if we need to make a change, or correct a problem in the future, we have access and control over
the database. That made our decision very easy," explained Scott Darling, manager, Information Asset, in the information systems division for NAC Re.

Greenbar software is implemented using industry standards and distributed client/server architecture. NAC Re selected a Hewlett-Packard NetServer running Microsoft Windows NT Server software. This is an ideal combination for the Greenbar application. The HP NetServer family is upgradable and permits
a rapid and low-cost move up as performance needs grow. The Microsoft Windows NT Server platform provides a robust and secure operating system and networking platform, including: a 32-bit operating system, preemptive multi-tasking, process and memory protection, and governmental (C2) level security.

On client workstations running Microsoft Windows 95, reports are formatted, filtered, sorted, and displayed in a spreadsheet-like screen referred to as the database view. The user-defined information is ready to be analyzed and used to make business decisions. This customized database view can be exported to any database or spreadsheet application. NAC Re has standardized on Lotus 123 for analysis and uses Lotus Notes for workgroup communications and document management. Greenbar is tightly integrated with the company’s other business applications through OLE 2.0. Today Greenbar is used by 60 professionals to make financial analysis and business decisions.

Each month 60,000 pages of computer reports are automatically exported to Greenbar. Once the reports are stored on Greenbar, all 60 users have immediate, on-line access to the information. NAC Re has created more than 50 different templates used to do data extraction with further export into Lotus 123 spreadsheets. Before Greenbar, professionals would look at paper reports and rekey data into the spreadsheets.  Now, the users can do this automatically, saving hours of effort.
In Greenbar, new templates for data extraction can be created in a matter of minutes. The Greenbar data extracts now servedozens of critical business processes in the company.

NAC Re has also begun to replace its reinsurance computer systems. A new underwriting application will be fully operational within the next few months integrating Greenbar in the submission clearance process. Before any new contract is written, underwriters must examine history data and existing contracts to ensure there is no conflict within any line of business.  Instead of converting the contract data, NAC Re developers saved time by writing these reports to Greenbar storage. Using
OLE, Greenbar was tightly integrated into the new application with a minimum of development effort and time. With the new application, when the underwriter begins the clearance process on his workstation, the Greenbar application is automatically launched and used to view the contract history data. NAC Re has more than 8,000 contracts that continue to be updated on the mainframe and the application integrates with Greenbar to select the most current version of the contract abstract and present it to the underwriter.

Future plans call for expansion of the Greenbar application into branch offices as the new branch underwriting system is implemented.

The Bottom Line

The FileNET’s Greenbar solution will pay for itself within a year.  With Greenbar NAC Reinsurance Corporation has:

• Saved hours of rekeying data from computer reports into spreadsheets for financial analysis. This can now be done automatically with Greenbar’s data extraction feature;
• Eliminated administrative costs associated with printing, copying, and distribution of paper reports;
• Enabled immediate, on-line access to financial reports for quick business decision making;
• Improved control and management of financial and business information by storing reports in a single, immediately accessible repository.

This success story courtesy of FileNet Corporation.

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