Domenick J. Yezzi, Jr., CPCU, is vice president, specialty commercial lines of the Insurance Services Office.
There is the Commercial Lines Manual? I thought it was stacked up here!"
A traditional bound manual with thousands of paper pages like the ISO Commercial Lines Manual is the size of a piece of decorative sculpture, but like an single document, it still can get lost or misplaced easily.
And once an agent finally locates the tome, left underneath a desk in the back of the commercial lines department or on top of a filing cabinet somewhere near the photocopy machine, the process of locating the correct forms for the right state and the proper years can take much too long. Add the task of creating a fresh policy from an ISO manual form and hours can be spent.
ISO Suite, a new CD-ROM-based database from Insurance Services Office in New York, takes the old Commercial Lines Manual and thousands of pages of other ISO insurance industry information and incorporates them into a single, searchable computer product that can be used by dozens of agents simultaneously at the desktop workstations.
The new product, released earlier this year, is updated monthly and designed for use on a single personal computer or an office local area network (LAN), according to ISO.
"With this new delivery system, customers access ISO material faster, reduce distribution costs, eliminate paper manuals and enhance employee productivity," says LeRoy A. Boison Jr., ISO senior vice president of insurance services. "Now customers can focus on growing their business and leave it to ISO to provide timely insurance information in a format that meshes with their workflows."
ISO Suite is the latest step in an evolution of electronic delivery of ISO forms and insurance information, adds Domenick J. Yezzi, vice president of specialty commercial lines. The new product is the successor to Commercial Lines Electronic Manual Services (CLEMS) an earlier generation of electronic delivery originally developed in 1992. The earliest system was designed for networks driven by mainframe computer systems and had limited search and retrieval features and only basic printing functions for forms, according to Yezzi. Later versions of CLEMS included more functionality but still used the paper manual paradigm.
"To create CLEMS, we took each of the ISO manuals' multistate rules, loss costs, forms and endorsements, and reduced them to a digital form that could be stored on CD-ROM and displayed on workstations," he explains.
However, the early attempts focused on the accumulation of data, not on the manipulation of the data and forms with personal computer tools such as database programs and word processors. Users viewed one manual at a time and had to move from section to section.
The new system operates on Microsoft Windows 95, 98 and Windows NT 4.0 operating systems and features Folio database organization, including powerful search capabilities, query tools and built-in hypertext links that allow agents to locate information according to criteria they can define, he says. Agents can select a line of business, the state and the effective date of policy and display the relevant rules and policy forms in a single computer window.
"Users can switch instantly from among rules, policy forms and related information. ISO Suite has been designed to work seamlessly with customers' workflows and provide a single point of access to insurance information from any location at any time," he says.
The Suite reference library includes ISO Commercial Lines Manual information for 12 lines of business, state and multistate rules, loss costs, the classification tables including Standard Industrial Classifications and North American Industrial Classification Systems (NAICS) codes, policy forms and endorsements, rating plans and fire protection classifications of communities based on ISO's evaluation of fire protection capabilities.
ISO Suite+, a version of the database for insurers, allows companies to combine company-specific and proprietary information with ISO materials to produce their own manuals and policy forms. Insurers can date-stamp rules and forms with their own effective dates and combine their own rules, rates and policy forms for endorsements. ISO Suite+ source documents are delivered in the popular Word for Windows 6.0 and Folio Flat File (FFF) formats. The database contains more than 80,000 documents and 200,000 applicability records.
Additional data viewable with ISO Suite+ includes:
* A.M. Best's Electronic Underwriting Guide and Loss Engineering Manual
* American Insurance Services Group's Premium Audit Advisory Service Classification Guide
* International Risk Management Institute manuals on risk transfer and workers compensation
* Rough Notes Policy Form and Manual Analysis
ISO Suite is delivered to agents monthly and can run on single or client workstations as well as LANs. The retail price for an ISO Suite single state database is $395 and includes up to five users at a single location. Countrywide ISO Suite database costs $2,795.
ISO also offers a 20% discount for members of agency affinity groups such as the Independent Insurance Agents of America (IIAA) and Professional Insurance Agents (PIA) and a 30% discount for insurers that sponsor ISO Suite for 10 or more agents.
The W.N. Tuscano Insurance Agency in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, has been running ISO Suite on its 40-workstation LAN for more than three months, says MIS director Michael Ledgard. Installation of the database for rapid access wasn't quite as easy as he would have liked but once online, the system has performed well.
"They never said it was perfect, but it's definitely an improvement over CLEMS. The first major difference is the form printing function. Access to ISO forms is one of the main reasons we use ISO materials and the ability to quickly print clean forms is an asset to operations. The old system allowed us to do some cut and paste of documents but it was difficult to get a reproducible form directly from the database."
Ledgard says the new ISO Suite has a more efficient organization with a table of contents that is similar to the print manuals that agents had used for many years. The Folio database, used by other insurance industry database products, is also familiar to users.
However, Ledgard says, "The jury is still out overall." He looks forward to an Internet-style product that uses hypertext markup language (HTML) like pages on the World Wide Web. This format, he says, has become preferred by many users and is compatible with new, high-speed intranets.
HTML design allows for fast movement from page to page of information and provides an easy-to-use interface that works just like the Internet. Most intranet pages move seamlessly from an office network to the Internet and can be updated quickly using online connections.
"It takes a long time for an insurance industry vendor to develop new versions of technology products," he says. "There's no real point to developing an intermediate version for Microsoft Windows. Most industry vendors are going straight to an Internet-style product."
Ledgard also looks forward to more efficient upload and download between agents and multiple insurers over the Internet and direct interface between products like ISO Suite and agent/company transactions. However, he admits that that kind of functionality may be years away considering the competitive nature of the industry.
ISO's Yezzi says the vendor is already at work on an Internet-style version of the ISO Suite and predicts that direct online access over the Internet is likely in the future to replace CD-ROM as improving communication technology provides faster access and greater "bandwidth" to deliver the huge amounts of information available in the ISO Suite database.
"Right now we are using the Internet to deliver weekly updates of ISO Suite+ to insurers," he says. DVDs, the new technology that delivers several versions of full-length motion pictures, may also serve as a new storage base in the future.
ISO also allows agents online updating of ISO forms databases that can be downloaded to desktop computers through ISOnet, an Internet-based information service. The service provides real-time access to the latest ISO forms. Other information that will be available to agents soon includes:
* Geographic Underwriting System (GUS) rating information.
* Property Claim Services daily recaps of severe weather events, catastrophe bulletins and hurricane tracking service.
* Engineering and Safety Service (E&S) with 1,500 technical reports ranging from abatement procedures to workplace violence.
* Premium Audit Advisory Service (PAAS) Classification Guides with classifications for general liability and workers compensation for 25,000 worker categories.
Retail price for ISOnet is the same as ISO Suite. ISO offers a 25% discount for agents who purchase both products. With the combined ISO Suite and ISOnet services, agencies can use the ISO Suite database for a single state or a few specific states on a regular basis and use ISOnet for countrywide information on an occasional basis, says Yezzi.
"ISO Suite and ISOnet in combination is a real option for agents who need more frequent updates of ISO information. Though the ISO material available over the Internet is slower to use, agents can use it for the information and forms that are not used constantly in an agency or for states in which the agency does only occasional business. "Agents can print camera-ready forms from ISOnet," he says. *
©COPYRIGHT: The Rough Notes Magazine, 1999