Ohio Mutual Insurance lowers costs, increases productivity with DXC Assure suite for property and casualty

Staying competitive in the insurance industry requires having the ability to continually evolve to meet the changing needs of policyholders, agents and key stakeholders. Ohio Mutual Insurance Group sought to implement a single modern system that could serve as a robust platform for handling essential business functions such as billing, claims and policy administration. The goal was for the platform to have the flexibility to transform to meet changing customer needs.

Established in 1901, Ohio Mutual writes $350 million in premiums each year covering homes, autos, farms and commercial properties across seven states. Remarkably, the company has earned an “A/Stable” financial strength rating from A.M. Best Co. for 30 consecutive years, a testament to consistently delivering a favorable operating performance and maintaining a strong balance sheet.

Single platform solution provides a foundation and flexibility

Insurance customers today expect rich digital experiences, information at their fingertips and flexible policies. Brad McCormack, vice president of Information Technology for Ohio Mutual, says that to be successful requires having a true sense of what’s happening in the marketplace and that “we ensure that we change and transform to meet those demands of our policyholders.”

Ohio Mutual has been on an innovation journey with DXC Technology for more than two decades. The companies rely on each other to drive innovation and evolve to meet the constantly changing needs of a complex insurance market. Ohio Mutual prides itself on selecting “partners” over vendors, and both organizations have worked as partners to develop a customized roadmap for Ohio Mutual that keeps it current while limiting disruption to the business. For decades, Ohio Mutual has navigated system transitions and technology transformations with DXC and today is integrating its systems into a single platform to not only perform functions essential to running an insurance business, but one that is also a flexible gateway for leveraging technology provided by an ecosystem of partners and technology providers. DXC’s Java version of POINT IN, extended with capabilities from the DXC Assure Digital Platform, is the single-platform solution powering Ohio Mutual’s introduction of new digital services, increasing speed to market, improving customer experience and more. 

Ohio Mutual is continuing its transformation journey with an upgrade to the DXC Assure suite for property and casualty  policy administration system,  a solution that can be configured and expanded as business needs change. Other components that Ohio Mutual currently uses include DXC Assure Claims, DXC Assure Billing and DXC Assure Legal. In addition, Ohio Mutual is one of the early adopters of DXC Assure Legal Insights, a solution that gives insurance companies access to the largest state court database in the United States for purposes of analyzing and predicting legal expenses and court outcomes, as well as a way to benchmark its legal spend against other insurers.

A key aspect of the DXC Assure products is that all essential business functions operate within a single, integrated system. As part of the transformation to the new platform, DXC helped modernize functions such as Ohio Mutual’s policy administration system that was running in COBOL to the much more flexible Java platform. The result is an integrated system that gives Ohio Mutual the capabilities to continue to adapt and evolve in the ever-changing insurance landscape. DXC continues to modernize those systems in an Agile methodology that allows Ohio Mutual to take releases in a planned fashion that is not dictated. The new releases incorporate previous enhancements and innovations derived from other customers using the DXC Assure products.  

Strong partnership breeds success

Success in the insurance industry is achieved by fostering strong relationships and building trust, and the long-term partnership between Ohio Mutual and DXC is representative of that. McCormack says, “We've been with DXC and their products for over 20 years at Ohio Mutual. When you think about a relationship and you think about the trust that comes with that, that is what you want in a partner. And that's what we have with DXC.”

As the leading provider of core insurance systems, DXC delivers more than four decades of industry domain knowledge and experience. “One of the things that Ohio Mutual has continually banked on is the knowledge of the insurance industry that DXC brings to its products and to us as a customer,” McCormack says.  

Part of that knowledge is DXC’s deep understanding of what it takes for insurance companies to keep evolving while providing a single platform solution that enables growth and transformation. “We have been extremely successful with the single platform strategy that we had, and it has allowed us to reduce our cost structure from an automation and from a processing standpoint,” McCormack says. “It’s allowed us to effectively respond to the changes in products and customer demands in the marketplace.”

In addition to enabling cost reductions, improving automation and smoothing out business processes, DXC Assure products have contributed to substantial productivity improvements by greatly reducing screen clutter for internal users. Previously, a typical Ohio Mutual end user used six screens to access the information needed to do their job. The DXC Assure products have helped improve screen response time and workflows by an estimated 30%, resulting in end users now needing to access only one or two screens.

McCormack says the DXC Assure solution has allowed Ohio Mutual to meet its business objectives. “In today's environment, a company our size has to do all the same things that companies much, much larger than us have to do,” he says. “A partnership with DXC and the use of their products allows us to meet that end-to-end solution and provide the same support and service to our members [as] larger companies that have many, many more resources and much more opportunity to build and integrate their systems than a company like Ohio Mutual.”

Ohio Mutual is a key advisor to DXC as an active member of the customer communities available at DXC. The carrier has a voice and is represented in every tier of the customer community hierarchy including user groups, product advisory groups and the customer advisory council. These groups allow Ohio Mutual to hear from DXC and their peers about not only the direction of products but also emerging topics that require planning at all levels of the insurance business. 

As the DXC Assure products help Ohio Mutual evolve as a company, the close partnership with DXC endures as the foundation for success.