Making the decision to migrate agency management systems (AMS) comes with the territory for many large insurance brokers.
Planning an AMS migration often takes years, and creates substantial headaches for large agencies, particularly within accounting and service departments. Carrier codes, lines of business, and policy structures, as well as accounting workflows, are only a few of the components that vary between AMSs.
The arduous system transition brings substantial increased pressure on accounting departments aiming to keep up with increases in workload that accompany such foundational changes.
Expanding headcount to manage reduced efficiency incurred in a migration only goes so far. Onboarding new team members during a chaotic transition, in which processes are still evolving, is inherently challenging. Oftentimes, hiring has the opposite effect in the short-term: further reducing productivity, and risking project delays and business objectives.
Proactively planning for the myriad of challenges that come with a migration was top of mind for Robert Monard, Treasurer & Controller, at widely respected, Ohio-based Hylant. After an organization-wide decision to migrate Hylant’s employee benefits division from Vertafore’s BenefitPoint to Applied Epic, Monard began to plan how the accounting team would approach the transition.
Meanwhile, Hylant launched a parallel initiative to automate its revenue accounting. Monard and his team partnered with Comulate, and within three months of launching had ended their BPOs and automated approximately 90% of manual reconciliation. In addition to the productivity gains anticipated and ultimately realized from this initiative, Monard considered whether Comulate could help achieve similar efficiencies for their upcoming AMS migration.
After automating its employee benefits revenue process, Hylant had expanded its Comulate engagement to include reconciliation of all its P&C business, which already was processed in Applied Epic.
Powered by a unified revenue layer connected to Hylant’s multiple AMSs, Hylant achieved full migration from BenefitPoint to Epic in a matter of hours with virtually no workflow changes for the accounting team. Hylant, using Comulate, simply began posting finalized reconciliations to Epic instead of BenefitPoint.
Instead of trying to manage formatting and failures of a new importer or hitting walls related to new policy structures, Hylant maintained the best-in-class 90% automation it had already reached with Comulate’s leading revenue automation.
The ease and seamlessness of a complex transition between AMS systems – without downtime or disruption to core workflows – was only possible due to a purpose-built multi-AMS architecture.
By powering its revenue process via Comulate, all historical transaction data and associated statements remained accessible, as if no change in systems occurred. This visibility provided Hylant with a powerful audit trail that would not otherwise exist.
A unified revenue layer is especially important for migrations that are strategically split into multiple phases. As production shifts to multiple AMSs, a transacting layer that crosscuts different systems, enables automated routing of transactions on the same carrier statement to multiple AMSs.
Comulate’s multi-AMS architecture simplifies management of unapplied revenue as well. Unapplied transactions are tracked a layer above any sole AMS, allowing them to be automatically applied and posted, even after an AMS change.
Large broker AMS migrations come with many challenges. Transitioning service and accounting are two of the most complex and risky endeavors. A unified revenue layer removes one of those from the equation, unlocking substantial resources to focus on making the other pieces more successful, ultimately increasing project success and minimizing negative business impact.
