Case Study: Michigan Millers

Michigan Millers chooses Duck Creek’s EXAMPLE Platform® to move from months to days in their product development cycle.

Michigan Millers Insurance Company Overview:

Michigan Millers Mutual Insurance Company underwrites auto, homeowners, agribusiness insurance and a full range of property and casualty coverages for small and midsize businesses.

 

Headquarters:	Lansing, Michigan
Lines of Business:	Personal Auto, Homeowners, Agribusiness Package, Commercial Lines Multi-line and Package
2006 Written Premium:	$193M
Web Site:	www.michiganmillers.com
Ownership: Solution:	Mutual Company Personal Lines Administration Solution

 

Business Challenge

In 2002, Michigan Millers Mutual began searching for a way to offer its product via the web; their goal was to enable their agents to do self-service policy processing. Michigan Millers also wanted a solution that enabled them to deploy their personal lines products faster; speed to market was essential. Michigan Millers knew that a tool-based system would give them the ability to modify and enhance the system to meet their particular business requirements vs. a code-based system; they wanted the flexibility that tool-based systems offered.

The Solution

Michigan Millers originally evaluated eight vendors and narrowed the field down to three vendors. During the Proof of Concept (POC) process, they provided Duck Creek Technologies with a set of requirements for a personal auto based rating system with a very narrow time frame to develop their POC. In a matter of days the application was built; the Michigan Millers team then threw Duck Creek’s team a curve ball and asked them to make significant changes to the system and within an hour Duck Creek’s team was able to make the recommended changes that Michigan Millers had sought. Duck Creek Technologies’ tool-based EXAMPLE Platform® gave Michigan Millers the best solution to meet all three of their strategy goals; web-enablement, the flexibility they desired in deploying their products and the speed to market that they needed to stay ahead of their competitors.

Results/Benefits

Using Duck Creek’s EXAMPLE Platform®, the Michigan Millers product development team could get product changes to the marketplace much more rapidly.

• Speed to Market/Flexibility: Michigan Millers was accustomed to making changes to their personal lines products that would take their IT product development team months; now they went from months to approximately days in their product development.
  

• Agent Utilization: Acceptance of the system by the Michigan Millers agents was phenomenal; in basically a two month period the company was able to meet their goals of having 90% of new business policy submitted by the agents via the Duck Creek EXAMPLE Platform vs. manually.
  
  
• Web-Enabled: Today Michigan Millers has 90% of Homeowners and 90% of Personal Auto new business being submitted directly by their agents—goal of 80% endorsements and they currently have 78% today.
  
  
• ROI: Achieved substantial headcount and productivity savings; Michigan Millers was able to re-deploy personnel into other departments, a savings of 25%. The Duck Creek EXAMPLE Platform fully automated a manual process that would in the past take days.
  
  
  

  “Michigan Millers product development team was very enthusiastic about Duck Creek’s EXAMPLE Platform® it allowed us the opportunity to get product changes to the marketplace much more rapidly and be ahead of our competitors as opposed to following our competitors or in some cases be behind our competitors.”

  Ralph Sukla

Learn more about Duck Creek Personal Lines Administration Solution.