Guidewire's 2009 Innovation Awards Winners - California Casualty, Missouri Employers Mutual, Suncorp and Unitrin

Winners demonstrate most innovative and most value added use of Guidewire offerings

SAN MATEO, Calif., October 14, 2009:

Guidewire Software®, a leading provider of flexible core systems to property/casualty insurers, congratulates the winners of its 2009 Innovation Awards: California Casualty Management Company, Missouri Employers Mutual Insurance, Suncorp and Unitrin, Inc.’s Property and Casualty Insurance Group (“Unitrin”).  The winners were recognized for using or implementing Guidewire’s applications in innovative ways to deliver significant business value to their organizations. 

All Guidewire customers were eligible to submit their in-process or implemented projects for consideration. The entries were voted on by a cross functional team of Guidewire personnel. The winners were announced in the final session of Guidewire’s Connections 2009, user conference. The winning projects, each demonstrating how Guidewire technology is helping these carriers deliver insurance their way, are:

California Casualty Management Company (California Casualty) – Maximizing Value of Guidewire Investment

California Casualty is a family-owned auto and home insurance company headquartered in San Mateo, California. The company has been in production with Guidewire ClaimCenter® since February, 2008.

Handling claims for customers in 44 states, each with varying regulations, California Casualty needed a way to help its file handlers keep up with varied and changing requirements to help the company stay in compliance. They also needed a way to easily make system changes to keep pace with the changing requirements. California Casualty developed two tools in ClaimCenter for this purpose: an automatic workplan generation tool which generates activities based on specified conditions and a recurring activity pattern tool which creates activities at pre-determined intervals of time when specific conditions are met.

The business uses both tools to modify its workplans without the involvement of IT, providing the flexibility needed to stay in compliance and ensuring file handlers have the appropriate task lists, based on individual file criteria, even as organizational or procedural changes are made. New workplan activities can now be put into production immediately. For more information on California Casualty, visit: www.californiacasualty.com.

Missouri Employer’s Mutual Insurance Company (MEM) – Business Process Improvement

Missouri Employers Mutual is Missouri's No. 1 provider of workers' compensation with 12,000 policyholders. MEM has been in production with Guidewire ClaimCenter since November, 2008 and is the recipient of the 2009 IASA Technology Achievement Award for its ClaimCenter implementation.

MEM improved its process of managing medical outcomes and costs through ease of use, flexibility in configuration, rules, activities, and reporting by configuring its ClaimCenter screens to accommodate both nurses and claims adjusters, while ensuring the data integrity of both roles. They used business rules and activities in ClaimCenter to increase collaboration, improve service and reduce costs. Additionally, MEM used reporting capabilities to manage by exception.

These tools, together with MEM’s ClaimCenter deployment, contribute to a projected Internal Rate of Return (IRR) of 13.1% surpassing MEM’s target of 12%. For more information on MEM, visit: www.mem-ins.com.

Suncorp – Use of Agile / Unique Integration(s)

Suncorp is Australia's third largest general insurance group, offering a range of coverage across Personal, Commercial, Workers Compensation and Compulsory Third Party insurance.  Suncorp is a winner of an earlier Guidewire Innovation Award in 2007, and has been in production with ClaimCenter since July, 2007.

Selected as a 2009 winner for its “iDash” project, Suncorp has enlisted a group of Brisbane area undergraduate students in a project to build dashboards that enable the real-time, up-to-the-second reporting status and statistics of claims, without the need to access the live database. Traditional line and bar charts are provided as well as dials and a live map of claim loss causes. These dashboards will most benefit the company during catastrophic events, allowing claims team leaders to rapidly get the status of their claims portfolio at a glance and enable the company to more effectively manage teams and resources during catastrophes.  For more information on Suncorp, visit: www.suncorp.com.au.

Unitrin – IT Return on Investment

The Unitrin Property and Casualty Insurance Group of companies connect a network of regional insurance carriers that provide a range of personal lines and commercial auto insurance products to millions of customers across the nation. The group is comprised of Kemper®*, Unitrin Specialty and Unitrin Direct. Unitrin is in production with ClaimCenter for First Notice of Loss (FNOL) across its three companies, since January 2009 and continues to implement additional ClaimCenter functionality.

Unitrin has been able to make some innovative changes to its ClaimCenter unit tests in order to enable the project to fully participate, both for integration and configuration code, in the daily enterprise build of Java code, thereby facilitating the alignment of the project with Unitrin’s agile development methodology and quality standards. In addition, automation of QA testing is currently underway.  Accomplishments include: creation of an FNOL test bed; ability to produce claims without manual setup for Release 2 functional testing; ability to run smoke tests daily in the development environment and weekly in the Systest environment; and a reduction in smoke testing time by half.  To learn more about Unitrin, visit: www.unitrin.com.

* Unitrin uses the registered trademark “Kemper” under license, for personal lines insurance only, from Lumbermens Mutual Casualty Company, which is not affiliated with Unitrin.

"Congratulations to the teams at California Casualty, MEM, Suncorp and Unitrin for their outstanding achievements and this well deserved recognition," says John Raguin, chief executive officer, Guidewire. “We are enormously proud of what all Guidewire customers are accomplishing around the world and it is very gratifying to see our products enabling a sea change in the way insurers can do business.”

About Guidewire Software

Guidewire Software is a provider of core system software to the global Property/Casualty (general) insurance industry. Designed to be flexible and scalable, Guidewire solutions give insurers the capability to deliver excellent service, increase market share and lower operating costs. Guidewire InsuranceSuite™, consisting of Guidewire PolicyCenter®, Guidewire ClaimCenter® and Guidewire BillingCenter® spans the key functional areas in insurance – underwriting and policy administration, claims management, and billing. Guidewire is headquartered in San Mateo, California, with offices in Beijing, Dublin, Hong Kong, London, Munich, Paris, Sydney, Tokyo, and Toronto. For more information, please visit www.guidewire.com.