Insurance Product Configuration Enables Product Lifecycle Management

Gartner’s Kimberly Harris-Ferrante recently published a report titled Insurance Product Configurators: Rising Interest and Fragmented Market, which provides Gartner’s definition for product configurators, a market summary, a vendor comparison and market distinction review.

According to Gartner, a product configurator is software that supports the development, pricing and management of insurance products. They are sold stand-alone (that is, not coupled with a policy administration/management system); however, they can be part of a large policy suite. They support the product development life cycle including a product library, development workbench, and rate and calculation workbench.

In 2010, Gartner sees growing demand for product development overall, including product innovation and the use of tools to support product development and configuration. While interest has primarily been in the North American and European insurance markets, there is rising demand in the Asia/Pacific region for this functionality.

As Kimberly points out, demand for insurance product configurators is driven by the desire of insurers to improve speed to market for new insurance products. However, many companies are challenged to accomplish this, given the fact that they cannot afford to replace the entire policy system and need a lower-cost alternative. Instead, they can opt to replace the product development platform, while maintaining the legacy policy environment — allowing them to postpone policy system replacement.

ProductAuthority®, an innovative product development and management solution enables enterprise product agility by providing the ability to drive relevant products to the right customers ahead of the competition at speed and volume. Unlike other solutions in the marketplace, ProductAuthority was not decoupled functionality that existed within a policy administration system, but was instead built from the ground-up as a “pure” insurance product configurator that is completely agnostic of any system that requires product data.  ProductAuthority supports all lines of business including Property & Casualty, Life & Annuity and Healthcare.

ProductAuthority externalizes product definitions from multiple, hard-coded operational systems into a central repository where insurance product components can be easily inherited to modify existing or develop new products—in weeks not months. Product definitions include re-usable information such as eligibility, packaging, underwriting rules, rates, calculations, and forms management.

ProductAuthority includes Lifecycle Manager.  Lifecycle Manager supports and automates the product development process providing all stakeholders with a view into the process, enabling the tracking and management of all participants and tasks to facilitate effective collaboration and to help eliminate any bottlenecks in the process.

With ProductAuthority, you can develop products concurrently to enhance revenue; automate manual processes to reduce costs and create audit-ability; dynamically bundle insurance products to create greater customer value; and get quality products to market up to 30% faster.

We’ve recently announced the availability of ProductAuthority® v7.0 which continues to provide rich product development, management and integration capabilities.  These enhancements enable large teams to work together more efficiently and effectively thus reducing the time required to configure insurance products enabling customers to get products to market faster, with less expense and minimized risk.

Insurers eager to capitalize on new markets and opportunities need to embrace automation, streamline processes, minimize risk and reduce costs to stay competitive.  Insurance product configurators enable insurers to gain the required capacity and concurrency that they need to develop multiple products with the same number of resources through automating and streamlining the product development process.

Having worked with some of the world’s largest insurers, ProductAuthority is a proven insurance software solution that can help you differentiate yourself in a crowded marketplace by launching quality products to market 30% faster, reduce IT product coding costs by 20% and minimize compliance risk by providing you with a single version of the truth.

To find out more about ProductAuthority, download your complimentary copy of the SMA Perspective: Product Management and Development: Fueling Top-Line Growth Through Insurance Product Agility

'In 2010, Gartner sees growing demand for product development overall, including product innovation and the use of tools to support product development and configuration.'