Harleysville Rolls Out End-to-End Personal Lines System

Duck Creek-centered Web-based system provides speed to agents, agility in rollout of new products and services into existing and new geographies.

Harleysville Insurance (Harleysville, Pa.; $3.7 billion in total assets) has taken a major step forward in its systems transformation efforts with the launch of an end-to-end personal lines system available through the company’s newly branded “accessHarleysvilleSM” agent portal. Built on service-oriented architecture (SOA) and utilizing Duck Creek’s policy administration platform, accessHarleysville//PLSM is currently up-and-running for agents writing personal auto and homeowners in Delaware and Rhode Island; other states will come on line incrementally four or five at a time as the rollout continues this year and throughout 2008, according to Harleysville CIO Akhil Tripathi.

While many carriers are creating front ends to integrate to their existing systems, accessHarleysville is a genuinely Web-based system, from end-to-end, for real-time rate, quote and issue, according to Tripathi.

“This is a purely .NET system,” Tripathi comments. “We built all the SOA services—we implemented some significant new technology.” He adds that Harleysville's IT organization used WebMethods for integration and Informatica for ETL, and built the core on an extensively modified Duck Creek platform. “We have developed re-useable services instead of creating fixed interfaces,” he says.

Harleysville's personal lines implementation will be followed by the rollout of its commercial lines system—accessHarleysville//CLSM—built around AQS technology, which is currently in acceptance testing and planned to roll out later this year and throughout 2008.

Once the rollout of both systems is complete, Tripathi believes Harleysville will be one of a small number of property/casualty companies no longer using legacy systems for its main operations. The significance of that is the enhanced flexibility the new systems will provide in terms of expanding new products, geographies and services.

Tripathi is confident about the commercial lines rollout and exuberant about the current personal lines implementation. “We were intensively execution focused, and the project is meeting and exceeding our expectations,” he says. “Bottom line, when fully implemented, these new accessHarleysville systems will dramatically shorten processing time and make us one of the easiest companies for agents to do business with.”

Anthony O'Donnell has covered technology in the insurance industry since 2000, when he joined the editorial staff of Insurance & Technology. As an editor and reporter for I&T and the InformationWeek Financial Services of TechWeb he has written on all areas of information ... View Full Bio