Case Studies

ICA is an independent adjusting firm providing the insurance industry with property related claim services for both personal and commercial lines since 1991. ICA is capable of handling day-to-day claims, as well as minor and major catastrophes, with both inside and field services. Rheal has been its primary and only offshore software development partner since 2008.

The client had begun to realize that, as with many legacy software applications, the functional value of their Claims Management System (CMS) was starting to age as many processes were being handled manually outside the scope of the application. This had led to an increase in costs and inefficiencies in productivity in general but most notably during catastrophes. Rheal was contracted by ICA to assist in the analysis of these efficiencies and play an integral role in addressing them. Some of the most challenging opportunities to address were as follows:

• There was no bridge to automatically export claim information from the CMS into the insurance company’s third party estimating software. This meant that the insurance companies had to manually re-enter all the information.
• Claims were assigned to the adjusters based on their credentials, work load, availability and their location/distance from the claim address. The entire assignment process was manual and involved simultaneous review of various reports and adjuster profiles. Carrying out this process for each assignment or groups of assignments consumed a substantive amount of time and slowed down the claim assignment process.
• There was limited provision for tracking claim data modifications made by the users. Change history tracking was available but it was very cumbersome to track the reasons for the modifications manually.
• Adjusters working in the field are on the move constantly, hence their exact location was never specifically known. This created inefficiencies in being able to assign claims to the adjusters who were ideally within the closest range of the claim location.
• Insurance companies preferred sending claim assignment information in electronic form. This information would then be manually entered into CMS which was a laborious effort and at times led to data inaccuracy.

• Rheal proposed and developed a tool to act as a bridge between the CMS and the various third party systems which enabled automatic importing & exporting of policy/claims data, assignment information and supporting documents into CMS, thereby eliminating all manual data entry.
• Rheal simplified the claim dispatch process by designing a map based view of all the adjusters out in the field available for assignment based on their availability, location, qualifications, certifications and workload. This made it very easy for the staff at ICA to assign new claims to the “right” adjusters based on all of these factors.
• Rheal implemented an electronic audit trail for tracking all changes made to the data within the application and provided a history view which helped the users compare the changes made as well as the time of the change and the related user’s details.
• Rheal developed mobile apps for iOS and Android to monitor the exact location of the adjusters. This enabled ICA’s dispatch team to ascertain the exact location of the adjusters and assign new claims more efficiently. Along with the geolocation feature, Rheal also implemented inquiry capabilities in the mobile application so that adjusters could view their open claims, overdue diaries and financial details while in the field.

Rheal has played a valuable role to ICA’s business growth by supporting them as they scaled their business and cost effectively evolved their infrastructure utilizing well developed technology. This was done by Rheal assisting ICA in solving their business challenges and increasing their processing capabilities through the implementation of solutions using latest technologies.