PegaWorld iNspire 2024: Church Mutual’s Digital Transformation Journey with P3Fusion and Pega

Welcome to our session about Church Mutual's digital transformation. I'll start off just to let you know a little bit about who we are. So I'm Rick Meehan from Church Mutual. I'm the director of workflow management and the product owner of Pega at Church Mutual. A little bit about Church Mutual. We're an insurance carrier, property and casualty, who insures nonprofits, camps, religious organizations. So we're the company who is supporting the people who are supporting other people. So food pantries, religious organizations, things like that. We're the ones who are protecting the greater good.

Hello, I'm Ben Ramasamy, I'm CEO of P3 fusion. We have been running P3 vision for the last seven years, helping our customers, building Pega solutions. And again we are experts in process automation and business rules and now we are focusing heavily on AI. We have helped a lot of our customers in the insurance as well as in financial and banking sectors, and happy to be here to share our story with Church Mutual. So let's start by talking about the problem that we had at Church Mutual. Why did we have to go find a solution like Pega? Well, like many carriers in the industry, we had legacy systems. We had these old systems. They weren't nimble. We weren't able to do what we wanted to. So Church Mutual is really transforming not just with Pega, but we're also putting additional systems in place. So we went and got Pega to help support where we wanted to be in the future. We also had all kinds of old processes. We've been a highly successful insurance carrier for a long time. People knew what they were doing, but they had these old processes. We really needed to get people off of those 25 year old processes and build out new processes that are going to support us in the future. Because this is a growing company. So when I started with the company, it was one company. Um, we had, you know, a decent amount of business. But in the ten years that I've been there, it's now four companies, there's subsidiaries, we're in new markets and it's rapidly growing. So we needed to be able to get off of the old systems, get to things that are going to allow us to grow for the future. And we had all these disjointed systems departments did. They worked in silos and they worked in their own systems. Those systems didn't talk to each other. If we wanted to update a piece of data at night, we had to do it in three different systems. That was not sustainable, and we needed to get to a platform that was going to allow us to work between departments and communicate to each other and have a source of data. And finally, like I mentioned, we were moving through new systems. So we had put a new policy administration system in place. And that meant that we lost all of our workflow one year after that date.

We had a very limited time to put a solution in place for renewals, so we had to act quick and we had to get this in place very quickly. Um, again, I'm just going to quickly touch on this, uh, the overall solution that we built, uh, for the Church Mutual. Um, again, one of the key things that we set right from the beginning is, um, we did a roadmap before even signing the contract. The roadmap gave us a clear understanding of what the vision for Church Mutual from more for the tactical and strategic goals for Church Mutual. So from that point, we were able to map out what how the design is going to be for the solution. You know, the biggest thing that we had in mind is about reusability and having a foundation built for Church Mutual so that from a data, from sharing the assets, you know, we have a solid design. So we set the priorities right. We put the roadmap. We know what Church Mutual is going to do from starting with their underwriting process, orchestration, to building the sales automation for the sales team, to going to the CDH for outbound campaigning to all the way to customer service. So we had this vision. So we were able to build the foundation, putting together all the rules. You know what we talked about the situation Layer Cake we kind of embrace that fully to make sure that whatever we are putting together from the day one, the assets are mapped. So that's that's how we know we build the cross functional flow.

Um, and another good thing is, you know, we had the executive support in the journey. So whatever we are trying to do, we had the executive support to push the business users to embrace, you know, how we are compartmentalizing the solution and putting together the overall phase solution. Um, and again, from a solution perspective, one of the key things that we did is, you know, we stayed within the guardrails. Again with any Pega solution. Staying within guardrails is key. So that's something we kind of kept in mind, making sure that we are not going out of the guardrail in what we are building. And that showed up in I think we had done two, um, upgrades. And the upgrades went really smooth because of staying within the guardrail. And one of the things that we learned is the continuous improvement. So over the period of time, the continuous improvement in terms of, you know, either collecting the requirements because for Church Mutual, having this transformational, big transformational project with Pega was new to them. So how to collect the requirements in terms of managing the requirements, giving to the developers or you know, how to prepare for the QA or how to prepare for the UAT. So every phase it was a good, uh, learning for both the proficient and also the customer. So we were able to take that learning for each of the implementations. And finally, the collaboration with P3. You know, we had a really good understanding of, you know, what value we brought in based on the industry experience we had. You know, we earned the trust in the beginning. So whatever we were kind of proposing the church mutual folks, they kind of embraced it and they were able to take forward with whatever the proposal we gave. This was a big piece for us. Is that, again, like Venkat said, this was new for us. We'd never done anything like this before. This is a huge transformation. What we were trying to do, and we had regular calls with the P3 team talking to them, learning from them that that was huge. He really, really helped guide me through things to think about. Right. And that was great.

We had at least two calls a week where we would talk about whatever was going on, um, get insights from them, talk about our problems and work through things together. So that collaboration with that partner was huge. You know, really looking at it, we looked at P3 as not a vendor to us, but a partner right where we get together and partner together to come up with the best solution. So the faces we built, um, I mean, when we started again, as I said, like the Church Mutual team were very clear in their focus what they wanted to build. So we start off with a solving the tactical problem. So they wanted to build the renewals because I guess the renewal you are up for, um, the expiration of what the old system is. So we started building the renewal. We started putting putting together the solution at that time, as I said, like, what we did is we built the assets in such a way that it will be used in multiple different applications of Pega. So whatever will build for renewal. We quickly pushed out into production, but then we started incrementally building the sales automation. From sales automation, we went to adding other products like what Compound Auto and then the marketing and then the customer service. The beauty is whatever the business rules, the UI we built for the underwriting, for the underwriters to underwrite a policy, the same assets were pulled into sales automation. So if a if a sales person comes and puts in a lead and the lead gets converted into an opportunity, we had the same assets right built into the sales automation. We didn't go to redo the user interface or the business rules or the routing. Everything that we built for underwriting, we used it for the sales automation. So all the assets that we built, we built from the ground up. So we used in the sales automation. Similarly, when we went to the marketing, what we did is when a sales automation, when a lead comes in and when it gets converted into opportunity, we have a disposition of whether the sales was won or lost. If it is lost, we took the data from there and fed right back into the campaign for marketing. So the systems were talking to each other. That's kind of the key. That's one of the key.

Um, learning P-3 fusion brought into Church Mutual is we go and build Pega solutions with multiple customers. Sometimes what happens is the systems are disjoint. They don't talk to each other. But here what we did is we made the system to talk to each other. We built the situation Layer Cake. So the data was able to flow through the systems without any disturbance. So that that helped us build the end to end process all the way to customer service and even the same customer service, whatever the customer service teams are doing. Say, for example, someone calls and they wants to onboard a new, uh, policy. We we kind of brought in all the UI and the business rules, whatever we built for the underwriting into the customer service module. So we didn't go to rebuild it. So this helped us end to end to reuse the assets. So one of the questions that we started to get as we started to implement things is what's the benefit? Are we getting anything out of this? Right. We just spent all this time building this. So if we look at this graph here, the white line is our baseline. That is on our legacy systems. We're going to say that that was 100% efficient. But those systems we weren't getting any more efficient than it was. I mentioned before that we were also implementing different systems. Right. We're redoing all of our legacy systems. The first thing we did is put in a policy administration system. The yellow line here shows if we had just the policy administration system without Pega, right.

The yellow line is actually that time period where that happened. Putting that new policy administration system in without workflow. It made us less efficient. So we started to drop down. So we put auto and work comp policies in there first. And on October of 2019, we put our first property casualty policy in there. So that is one year from them. We have to have a solution in place. And at that point, we noticed that the time that it took to do a renewal increased by 15 minutes. It used to take us 30 minutes. Now it takes us 45. So we're starting to head down a pretty bad path here. The red line is if we were to continue down that path and not put Pega in place, where would we have been at the end of last year? You can see we're about -200% efficient, right? That's not sustainable. That would have been a really, really bad place to be. So the green line is actually what happened then. So we put Pega in place November 2020 with one thing and that was property and casualty renewals. Pega is grabbing anything that went into the policy administration system a year ago, and it's running it through. It starts with a very small number, but what we found is now we're down to five minutes of renewal and the back office staff is only touching 5% . So we started to level off here. One year later, December 2021, we put new business and sales automation in place. At that point, even with Pega's help, our teams are falling behind. They can't keep up. So we're not on the red line. There's a big gap between red and green. And even at that, teams are falling behind. So if we would have been on that red line, it would have been really, really bad. Now Pega starts to take us up, right? We're still below the white line. December 2022. We put work comp, work comp and auto renewals in. And now that's where you see the break even and we start to go up December 2023. We're plus about 200% efficient. So we're comp and auto Our back office staff is touching 25% of those. And for our property and casualty, they're touching about 5% . And we're down to five minutes of transaction rather than even before we put the new policy administration system in place. That was 30 minutes. This is a significant improvement here.

We have people who, before we did this, before we hit that break even line, are having to work mandatory overtime, things like that. That doesn't exist anymore. I can go home and spend time with their families now. So this had a real impact on our employees. It had a real impact on our customers. They're not getting late policies anymore. This is huge. We didn't want to just put something in place, though and walk away and say, okay, everything's fine. We also built a robust enhancement process, and we knew that we had all of these different business areas that were involved in Pega. So we built this process out to have it really start with the business. So each business area gathers enhancements from their teams. Hey, I wish it was like this. I wish it did that. And then we get together every other week with a representative from each one of those departments, and they bring forward their top priorities. And then as an enterprise, we prioritize those. So our underwriting team may have three items they're looking for. Sales may have two, marketing may have one, customer service may have six. And we all get together and decide what are the most important things that we're going to work on. And then not only what are we going to work on, but who's impacted. This isn't siloed anymore. Sales items don't just impact sales. Sales items, impact underwriting, sales items, impact marketing, customer service. So we get all of those areas together. We figure out what is it that you guys really need together to be successful. We go ahead and build that, and we have that team come back again and test it out. Hey, how did we do? How are we doing?

Yeah, it's good. We got our procedures ready. We're ready to go to production, move it to production, and then we communicate out to everybody. Here's what's happening and here's the successes of it. So this just shows you that this really is cross-functional. So you can look at this graph and you can see it's not 100% sales. There's sales. There's underwriting. Processing is our back office staff customer service and customer service is a low number now. But we just implemented the customer service module. That number is about to skyrocket. They got all kinds of things they want from us now. Right now that we have it in their hands, they say, hey, there's all this great stuff we want now. We want more, we want more, we want more. You can also see there are some there that are just all because we couldn't even categorize it as a department. Everybody wanted it. Everybody came forward and said, we'd like this item. So you saw the graph, but what does that really mean? Right. So here 95% reduction in back office. So on our renewals the back office team had to touch 100% . They had to manually kick them off. They had to manually book them. They had to do all of those items. Now, 95% of that, they don't touch, they can go, they can spend time on something else. What that meant in March of 2024 is that it was $300,000 in savings, so if we would have had to touch those transactions, it cost us $300,000. And that was an 8% reduction in our in our flow for renewals, so we could decrease the time that it took us to get renewals out because we had to have less people touch it and we could automate items. So at the end of the day, that means $2.5 million annually that we save by doing what we did.

Um, I'm just to summarize, um, the overall solution here and the overall journey we had with Church Mutual, Pega and P3 fusion. Um, again, um, replacing the legacy systems was a challenge. I mean, with any insurance company, you have, um, a lot of siloed system of record data. Um, again, one of the key things that we did is, um, we were able to stop the integration so that we can build the integration while the middleware team is building the integration. So we were able to do things in a creative way, not to delay the project. And we were able to integrate the workflow orchestration with the system of record, getting the data and data out. So the design from the ground up was really helpful. And again, the phased approach is really key for any, I mean, enterprise wide Pega projects. And again with the collaboration and the understanding from Church Mutual, we're able to phase each of the delivery in a in a way that each of the each of the phases are extremely successful, um, and continuous improvement for each implementations. We kept learning from the design from the, from the how we collect the requirements, how we do the QA, UAT. Again, as you can see here, it's like four different major applications we implemented. So the continuous improvement was key for us. Uh, again, cross functional improvement, we were able to understand what different departments are trying to do and how we can put the design in such a way that we can do a bottom up design so that we can do reusability. We had a great support from executives to embrace the solution because it is a agile development. It is an incremental development. The users expect everything at the same time, but the executives were able to give us the support so that the adoption was much more easier with the end users. And, um, and again, the operational enhancement process, we constantly look at what we are getting from what we are implemented and then see the output and then constantly keep improving the operational efficiency. And again, as Rick mentioned, the $2.5 million in the savings was huge. Questions? Um, you spoke of your, uh, it sounds like your organization in terms of how you selected what to do from your cross-functional departments. What's your methodology by, how do you decide which process or which project to initiate? You have multiple inputs. Uh, poster Kara Manton.

How are you selected? Yeah. So that's a that's a good question. And going in I thought, oh man, these are going to be really tough conversations. We're going to have people really fighting it out. You know, surprisingly enough, um, when people would bring things forward, everybody pretty well agreed. It was pretty clear cut. They came forward. Um, now people did come forward with here's the problem I have here's what we believe we're going to get out of this. But we never had a time where we had really competing priorities. It was pretty clear. And everybody on the team agreed. Yeah, we believe that their item is the most important. That was a very surprising item to me, I thought. I did not think it was going to work that way. Yeah. Did you guys find this information on the writing workbench to help the underwriters underwrite prioritize their work? So we have not our, you know, our biggest focus was on helping that back office staff, Um, but going forward, that is one of our next highest priorities, is coming up with an underwriting workbench and really figuring out what is that data that we want to bring in. Um, and I would say, you know, underwriting workbench. Yes. But also we're looking at it more holistically to say there's other departments that have to go to a lot of different spots to grab things. How do we prevent that? Not just in underwriting and sales and different departments. How do we keep them in the one platform and prevent them from going other places as much as possible? Looking at your chart slides back those things after the first presentation of the security design proficiency kind of roll out and slide back up the baseline. How did you manage business expectations during that period of time, where efficiency had been reduced back to what it was originally? Um, just to have that confidence for future applications? Yeah, that was a very difficult item. So, um, mainly it was me having conversations with people a lot and pulling reports out and saying, look, here's how many transactions we didn't have to touch, right? Um, I mean, we knew it. We knew it was going to happen because we slow rolled things into the new policy administration system. We did one state at a time. It started very slow. So we knew that was going to happen. But a lot of it was then talking about it afterwards and actually showing people last month we didn't touch 360 transactions. This month it's 500. To show them that we were starting to build that.

Um, that definitely was a concern early on. So the fact that it's like that, I was curious on the what happened before the Pega implementation, and you already have Pega prior to that, you were. Yeah. I guess we did not have Pega before that. So we had an old legacy system that did workflow. It did policy administration as well. And so we decoupled the policy administration out of that and just had that running. So the reason that you're seeing the inefficiency there is because we're just having a policy administration system with completely manual processes. So people would get reports. Here's policies that are going to renew and they'd have to manually renew them. Um, and so that's why you start to see the green Line. That's when we actually implement Pega and that's where we start to level out. But when you start the Pega Constellation part. When the when do we start requirements and all of that actually kicking off the project. Um. I don't know if you had this slide, like, this is how this is going to go. You know, back in 2019 or something you projected out? Probably not. No, we didn't have a slide like this, but we knew when we put the policy administration system in place, we knew that there was no workflow to go with it. So we knew that this was going to come whether we saw this or not. So I think we actually started the original Pega project somewhere around December of 2019. And that's where we were just starting the renewals. And then the first implementation was November of 2020. So there are about one year implementations. We'd work on something for about a year. Implement it. Any other questions for speakers? Did you have someone that already owned the end to end customer experience and the process? Uh, or is it all different functions? Right. And they just own. And if you have to take that on, you have someone now that knows we'll get it in Process Mining or, so, we did not have that in place before we started this.

Um, that was where I came in. Um, and that's what I did. So I would get together with the business. And as we were reviewing requirements, I would talk about how we did things. Um, it's led by me, but it's. It's. You know, we bring in those representatives from those other departments to do it. So we talk about it as a group. Um, but no, we did not have anything like that before. We didn't have mapped out processes. We didn't have anything. Um, so we just kind of jumped in with both feet and tried it. Is that your officially your role to do that, or are you still doing it as part of the project to roll this out? And when it's all rolled out and it is, it's like, is that your role? Yeah. Um, it's part of my role. So the business processes, there is a group of people in the business who own that together. Um, I consult on that and come in on that. But if we're doing something in Pega, then it definitely comes into my wheelhouse. And then I look at it and talk about how to make it efficient. Things like that. Yes. I think one of your slides you spoke about rolled it out of the face. Yeah. So the my assumption is that your NDP. And if yes, how does your NDP align with your brand. Yeah. So I would say yes. That was our MVP right. Is we had these different phases that that went into place. And then that was one big project as a whole. So that was our MVP. Um, it did it did line up pretty well with this. I actually think we did a little better than we thought we were going to. Um, and did more automation than we thought. Yeah. Um. Oh, man. I learned so many things along the way. So, like, Ben mentioned continuous improvement, right?

Um, I was a business guy for ten years. I was in underwriting. I had never done anything like this before. I came over, and so it was learning things at the beginning. Definitely all the time. But I think one of the things that I really learned, the big thing that I learned is the key and prioritization and focus, right? To me, this is a huge platform. There's so much you can do with it and it's easy to get caught up in everything, right? We want to try and do all of this at once, and then everything is going to be better. And I think you would find yourself 20 years later with nothing, right? So the more you can find the thing, whatever that is. Right. And for us, I mean, we knew the renewal thing , right? That was crystal clear. But like when we got the customer service module, we didn't track very well the interactions that we had with our customers for customer service. Is it about adding and building? Is it about this? And so when we were picking prioritization for that, some of it was, well let's ask people, let's figure out and we pick five right. And we said these are the five that we're going to do. And that's it. So to me it's picking the item prioritizing, focusing on it. Make sure you accomplish that really well and then move on to the next item. Don't try and do too much at once. That was definitely what I learned. The big, big item that I had. So let's talk about the Blueprint products. And obviously you didn't have that when you were 20. You have a sense for how that tool might have helped with your process. Um, I don't I mean, I'm really excited about that. Um, it probably would have helped Benkert's team. From our standpoint. We had no idea what the heck we were doing. Um, I don't know if we would have even been able to think about that, right? I mean, now, yeah, now we know. Think about that now and think about all the things I would use it for. Um, and there's somebody who works for me who always says to me, man, if I could go back and do it differently, I say, yeah, but that's how we are where we are, right? Because we learned all of those things along the way, and now we do it better. So I don't even know if we would have used it Venket probably would have used it. I mean. With the with the Blueprint the way I'm looking is it kind of drastically changes the way in how we are. um, working with the subject matter experts and collecting the requirements.

Uh, the Blueprint would be like a companion for us in that journey. Um, collecting things, showing them quickly. It all happens in minutes. Uh, having the Blueprint makes the requirement gathering process more easy. But keep in mind every customer is different. At the same insurance policy by different customers. The way the process is different, the Blueprint Blueprint is not going to solve everything, but it's going to make the process so easy. So it is. It is a huge thing for the developers, huge, huge things for the business analyst who's sitting and gathering the requirements, where we can just build things and show in collecting requirements rather than just sitting and talking. It's huge. It's huge. You go into this when you are bringing on a new policy system. You go in knowing that you were going to bring. In work flow. Was there a learning point when you said, this guy, you know, we needed something else around this? No, I think when they went into the policy administration system, they knew that they were going to have to bring on work flow at some point. Right. But the main focus and that was we got to get this policy administration system up and running, and then we'll look at workflow. So it was after they were already extensively down the road in the policy administration system that we went and picked Pega. We knew we were going to have to find something though. Yeah. So we're going to continue to use that enhancement process that we have that's probably small to medium type items that we run through there.

Um, we do have an IT team that is really learning Pega and bringing on good resources there. And then P-3 also does still support us. So we do have annual budget to, you know, decide what are the next items. So we just launched customer service module. That was the that was the latest one. And now we're looking at what are the next item next big items that we want to do. Yeah. So we are getting we're moving away from those legacy systems. So we have when a customer moves to the new policy administration system, they don't continue to have policy numbers over in the old one. So we're transitioning everybody over to the new and getting rid of the old. But the customer service team could still see the old stuff. They had policies with this three years ago in the old system. Yes. They can see that here. So that legacy system isn't going to stick around and you're going to have to go to two spots. It's going to be Pega and the new policy administration system. Yes. So this is just back office staff. So we call it our processing team. So they were the ones setting them up. They're the ones issuing the policies. Um underwriting does still touch quite a bit of policies. So they touch 70% of policies right now. And that's a different set of rules. Yeah. Yes. No, no. So they go and gather information or look other places, but they get the case routed to them in their workflow. There are some things that they review in Pega. And then there are still some things that they go look other places. I mean, that's one thing. I mean, we just focused on the process orchestration to start with, where there will be a lot of swivel chairs. Now the system is evolving. Now we go and try to automate as much as to avoid the swivel chair so that they can stay. So basically we are kind of evolving the system step by step, not trying to boil the ocean to start with. So I mean there are a lot of enhancements that's coming in. Um, like for example, if they want to do a claims now the system can talk to claim system. In the beginning it will be just a swivel chair. So that's how like we are kind of automating this. What was your initial vision for Pega.

And obviously you had the policy administration system that needed a workflow. But as far as vision eventually defaulted to customer. Service, or has that been kind of the add on the next step, the next step. So right now our vision early on was to get customer service in place. CDH in place, underwriting sales. That was. So we phased it out and said, here's the way we're going to do it. But we knew right away we wanted everybody in the platform end to end who interacts with the policy. So right away we knew that, and that's why we just kind of said, all right, we got to do these in phases though, so that we make sure we can get the most important items up front. Yeah. So, um, no, we didn't we didn't, you know, downsize. We didn't do anything like that. Um, people were already overwhelmed, right? There was already too much work. Um, how we paid for it. Um, I don't I don't really know. I wasn't involved in any of that. Um, That was other people. And none of them are here, so I can't turn around and say, hey, you got to ask this person. I'm just the guy they brought in to manage it after they paid for it. Yeah. What's that? Employee satisfaction. Now? Um, it seems to be better. Um, yeah. Like I said before, we had people who had mandatory ten hours overtime a week and that a week or two. Okay. That's fine. Right. But a long term of that is where people down, right. Um, they got to go home and see their kids too. And so I, you know, I have gone around and talked to people, um, and not having that burden on them, you know, you have people who are much happier right now. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.