Implementing Advantage
For Bill Jenkins, vice president and chief information officer of Harrisburg, Pa.-based Penn National Insurance Co. ($600 million in written premium), IT plays a key role in strategically supporting business drivers for profitable growth. Among Jenkins' IT directives are providing Penn National's independent agents with tools to facilitate ease of doing business with the carrier and pursuing a real-time, straight-through processing environment.
To achieve these goals, Jenkins, who joined Penn National in December 2004, has been focused on leveraging the carrier's IT resources to complete a five-year commercial lines policy management legacy system overhaul, research a new personal lines policy management system, build a new data warehouse, implement predictive analytics and enhance the agent interface Web portal. By updating the carrier's technology, Penn National hopes to improve its competitive position, according to Jenkins. "We are trying to be more competitive in the market and from a strategic standpoint," he says. "IT factors into our corporate strategic plans to increase business in both the personal and commercial lines."
At the core of those efforts was the initial project to replace the carrier's commercial lines policy management platform. Penn National has been working since 2000 to replace its legacy commercial lines policy management system from Blythewood, S.C.-based Policy Management System Corp. (which was acquired by El Segundo, Calif.-based CSC in 2000) with Allenbrook's (Portland, Maine) Microsoft (Redmond, Wash.) Windows-based Phoenix System to support straight-through processing and predictive analytics capabilities. Although the implementation was completed when Jenkins joined the company in 2004, he has continued to work with Allenbrook to add customized capabilities to the system -- such as access to the source code so Penn National's IT team could make changes to the system, and anniversary ratings for Penn National's workers' compensation product.
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