Microsoft Customer Solution
Financial Services Industry Case Study
Insurance Firm Speeds Time-to-Market
60 Percent with Better Policy Administration
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Insurance
Customer Profile
Founded in 1904, Sentry Insurance and
its subsidiaries provide property and
casualty insurance, life insurance,
annuities, and retirement programs for
businesses and individuals. Sentry
employs 4,500 people.
Business Situation
Sentry wanted to replace three
mainframe systems that supported its life
insurance business with a single policy
administration solution built on flexible,
extensible, and cost-effective
technologies.
Solution
Sentry modernized its policy
administration with EXL LifePRO from EXL
Service, an administration platform that
runs Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft
SQL Server 2008 and interoperates with
Microsoft Office programs.
Benefits
 Improved business agility
 Reduced operating costs
 Improved access to data
 Better customer service

“With EXL LifePRO, we consolidate all our life insurance
products on a single solution built on Microsoft
technologies and save approximately $450,000 a year
in IT expenses.”
Fred Schroeckenthaler, IT Director, Life & Health, Sentry Insurance
Sentry Insurance, a mutual insurance company in Stevens Point,
Wisconsin, wanted to consolidate three mainframe life insurance
policy administration systems on a single solution running on
up-to-date technologies. Sentry deployed EXL LifePRO from EXL
Service, an administration platform that is built on the Microsoft
.NET Framework software and runs on Windows Server 2008 and
Microsoft SQL Server 2008. The solution enabled Sentry to retire
the three mainframe systems and save approximately
U.S.$450,000 in IT costs annually. Now that business users and
actuaries use EXL LifePRO to build new offerings without IT
involvement, Sentry improved speed-to-market by 60 percent
and saved an average of $60,000 in development costs per
product, helping the company meet market demands.
“We had been talking
about reducing the
maintenance and
support costs for these
systems for quite a few
years. ... We needed to
find the right solution
built on the right
technology.”
Fred Schroeckenthaler, IT Director, Life &
Health, Sentry Insurance
Situation
Sentry Insurance is a major insurance
company in the United States. Founded in
1904, Sentry and its subsidiaries provide
property and casualty insurance, life
insurance, annuities, and retirement
programs for businesses and individuals
throughout the United States. With assets
of U.S.$11 billion and a policyholder surplus
of more than $3.3 billion, as of December
31, 2010, Sentry Insurance is rated A+ by
A.M. Best, the industry's leading rating
authority. More than 1.1 million
policyholders put their trust in Sentry.
Outdated Mainframe Systems
Sentry has approximately 80,000 life
insurance policies in place. Until recently,
the company relied on three aging
mainframe systems to administer all its life
insurance lines of business: universal life,
variable annuities, and traditional life
insurance. These life insurance policy
systems were written in a combination of
COBOL, Assembler (BAL), and Telon
programming languages. The policy level
date was stored in a combination of DL/1
and DB2 databases and VSAM (virtual
storage access method) files.
“We were running our mission-critical life
insurance lines of business on technology
that was more than 30 years old,” says Fred
Schroeckenthaler, IT Director, Life & Health,
at Sentry Insurance. “The staff members
responsible for maintaining these systems
were getting close to retirement, and it was
becoming increasingly difficult to find new
employees who wanted to work with these
development languages.”
Slow Time-to-Market
The business ramifications of the outdated
IT environment began to put pressure on
the IT department to find an alternative.
The most pressing issue centered on
business agility: It took too long to bring
new products to market—on average
between nine months and a year—and this
delay reduced the company’s ability to stay
ahead in a competitive industry.
“To build a traditional life insurance
product, with cash values and loans, our
actuaries had to test and determine the
policy rates using [Microsoft] Excel
spreadsheets and then file the product with
our domicile state of Wisconsin,” explains
Schroeckenthaler. “Then the actuaries
would provide the details to our
programming staff. We hoped it matched
closely to an existing product. We had to
go through every line of code, copying the
modules that referenced the existing
product and updated the modules with
new code where we needed new
functionality. If a new product matched
closely with an existing product, it took the
IT staff about 1,000 hours to go through all
of the modules, clone them, change the
product ID, and perform testing.”
For a product that had significant, or even
mildly significant, differences to one that
Sentry had already rolled out, it could easily
total 2,000 to 2,500 IT hours to provide the
new functionality.
Difficulty Extracting Information
Extracting data from the three separate
mainframe systems was another issue that
impacted the business. Creating new
management reports took a large amount
of development time. Work had to be
completed to extract data from each of the
systems and consolidate it into one report.
“Every time management wanted a new
report, we had to search for data across
three different systems,” says
Schroeckenthaler. “So it was very
cumbersome and costly for us to provide
the appropriate management information
“And with SQL Server, it’s
just so incredibly easy to
get at the data and to
put it into people’s
hands for manipulation
and analysis.”
Fred Schroeckenthaler, IT Director, Life &
Health, Sentry Insurance
to the business. Reporting always involved
IT staff.”
variety of different product lines to help us
make this transition.”
Inefficient data access added an additional
challenge to complying with state audits,
consequently, because Sentry IT staff audits
were also time-consuming. “There are
insurance industry exams or audits required
annually,” says Schroeckenthaler. “Needless
to say, it took too much time and effort to
provide the requested information back to
the state auditors.“
Solution
Impact on Customer Service
Poor access to information also affected
customer service. To answer customer
queries on the phone, Sentry staff had to
search for information in all three systems.
“If the customer asked for a change
impacting the price of the policy, we
needed to get back to them the next day
because calculating the price for a change
was done in an overnight batch process,”
explains Schroeckenthaler. “We didn’t like
having customers waiting that long for
information about their policies.”
In an effort to solve these issues, Sentry
decided to modernize its policy
administration platform. This meant looking
for a new solution to replace the three
mainframe systems. Sentry IT staff wanted a
server-based solution built using either the
Microsoft .NET Framework or the Java
platform.
“We had been talking about reducing the
maintenance and support costs for these
systems for quite a few years,” says
Schroeckenthaler. “However, the project
was daunting: It’s a huge challenge for
insurance companies to migrate their lines
of business off mainframe systems that
they have been using for decades. We
needed to find the right solution built on
the right technology. We also needed a
vendor with experience administering a
Sentry Insurance chose a solution by EXL
Service called EXL LifePRO for its superior
functionality and because the policy
administration platform runs on the
Windows Server operating system and
Microsoft SQL Server data management
software and is built on the Microsoft .NET
Framework. EXL LifePRO uses Windows
Presentation Foundation, which is included
in the Microsoft .NET Framework and is a
unified programming model for building
Windows client applications with engaging
user interfaces. On the client, EXL LifePRO
interoperates with the Windows 7
operating system and Microsoft Office
programs.
“A Microsoft-based solution is so easy to
use,” says Schroeckenthaler. “Everybody at
Sentry is familiar with Microsoft Word and
Microsoft Excel. And in the IT shop, we
have experience in developing Microsoft
.NET applications. And with SQL Server, it’s
just so incredibly easy to get at the data
and to put it into people’s hands for
manipulation and analysis.”
Sentry was also impressed with the features
and functionality of EXL LifePRO, which
offers ease of integration throughout the
enterprise. Access to EXL LifePRO business
logic is enabled through a suite of .NET
application programming interfaces (APIs).
Sentry IT staff have used the APIs to build
additional applications that extend the
functionality of EXL LifePRO—another
reason why the company chose a solution
based on Microsoft technologies.
“We write a lot of applications for SQL
Server based on the .NET Framework, so
LifePRO was a good fit in our environment,”
says Schroeckenthaler. “We liked the idea
“Over the years, EXL’s
highly knowledgeable
technical and business
consultants were
essential members of
Sentry’s dedicated
project team."
Fred Schroeckenthaler, IT Director, Life &
Health, Sentry Insurance
of building applications on top of LifePRO
to extract data out of the SQL Server
database and present it on web pages or in
reports.
“We needed a vendor that had experience
administering a variety of product lines and
who could provide us with a solution that
could handle the complex regulations
around our universal life and securitybased products,” continues
Schroeckenthaler. “EXL brought all those
strengths to the table.”
A Phased Deployment
Beginning in 2006, EXL began working with
Sentry to migrate its life insurance policy
administration systems from the
mainframes to EXL LifePRO, at that time
running on the Windows Server 2003
operating system and Microsoft SQL Server
2005 data management software. EXL
performed a gap analysis and discussed
modifications to the system to ensure that
Sentry gained a solution that would fully
meet its needs for all products. Sentry
planned a phased deployment, starting
with migrating its traditional life products
to EXL LifePRO. In June 2008, it went live
with its variable annuities line of business
on EXL LifePRO. Sentry successfully
completed an additional five policy
conversions with the last one being
completed in September 2010. Each
conversion consisted of a group of similar
products that made business sense to
convert as a block of policies.
“For each phase of the conversion project,
we mapped the mainframe data to EXL
LifePRO, and Sentry used EXL LifePRO tools
to interact with SQL Server to import the
data,” explains Ed Brown, Vice President at
EXL. “The financial information, the policy
information, and the claims associated with
those policies needed to be converted.
Also, the agents who sell Sentry products in
the marketplace have to have information
in their systems that tie into EXL LifePRO,
so Sentry can pay them their commissions.”
Building Additional Applications
Sentry is taking advantage of the APIs that
come with EXL LifePRO to build Windows
applications that extend the value of EXL
LifePRO for the company. To date, the IT
staff has developed approximately 50
Microsoft Visual Basic .NET 2010 programs
that run in conjunction with EXL LifePRO.
Many of these programs were developed to
interface data to downstream systems and
give access to information on life policies
to people who do not have access to the
EXL LifePRO system.
“We interface premiums, losses, and
commissions to the corporate general
ledger system,” says Schroeckenthaler. “We
also created web pages to provide realtime information to agents on the status of
their life applications and sales statistics.
Before implementing LifePRO, this
information was printed on reports and
mailed to the agents on a monthly basis.”
Another application written in Visual Basic
is a new underwriting workflow system.
“We’re pulling a lot of information out of
LifePRO and using it to track the
underwriting process and make sure it gets
completed,” explains Schroeckenthaler.
“The new application stores all of the
information associated with underwriting a
life policy electronically, so we no longer
require paper file folders.”
Today, approximately 90 Sentry employees
use EXL LifePRO daily. “Over the years,
EXL’s highly knowledgeable technical and
business consultants were essential
members of Sentry’s dedicated project
team,” says Schroeckenthaler. “They
provided us a tremendous amount of help
to implement the LifePRO system. We are
looking forward to working with them
again to help us upgrade to the latest
version of LifePRO, version 16, in 2012.”
Benefits
"What would have taken
us 15 months in the past
to deploy and get ready
to sell, we can now bring
to market in six.”
Fred Schroeckenthaler, IT Director, Life &
Health, Sentry Insurance
After deploying EXL LifePRO, a flexible
policy administrative solution built on
Microsoft technologies, Sentry Insurance
consolidated its three life insurance policy
administration systems onto a single
client/server solution. Today, Sentry is a
more agile business, bringing new products
to market more quickly than ever before. Its
modern policy administration IT
infrastructure has significantly reduced
operating costs and enabled staff to
provide better customer service. Today,
Sentry employees can work more
productively and make better decisions
with easy access to business data.
“With LifePRO, we consolidate all our life
insurance products on a single solution
built on Microsoft technologies and save
approximately $450,000 a year in IT
expenses,” says Schroeckenthaler. “Along
with reducing operating expenses, we can
implement new products faster and provide
better customer services to both internal
business people and external
policyholders.”
Improved Business Agility
Instead of taking up to a year to write code
and build new products on the mainframe
systems, Sentry actuaries and product
groups are using EXL LifePRO’s flexible
product rules engine to build new offerings
with virtually no IT involvement. And
because Sentry developers are already
familiar with SQL Server, they have built a
separate database for the actuaries to test
the new product and fine-tune rates and
product pricing directly in EXL LifePRO.
Compared to the previous method, this
saves the actuaries the trouble of
explaining to IT what they want and then
working through months of testing to
verify that IT built the product correctly.
“Today, product development is back in the
hands of the actuaries and product
managers,” says Schroeckenthaler. “IT may
update some of the points of integration
with other systems or add a new product
code to a set of SQL Server tables that
control reporting interfaces, but that’s
about it. What would have taken us 15
months in the past to deploy and get ready
to sell, we can now bring to market in six.”
Also, Sentry is a more nimble company with
regard to developing internal applications
that build on the benefits of the EXL
LifePRO solution to address a number of
business needs. This is a direct result of the
extensible Microsoft technologies upon
which EXL LifePRO is built.
“It would have been cost prohibitive to
build some of these new .NET Framework–
based applications on the mainframes,”
says Schroeckenthaler. “One of the biggest
driving forces for the migration was to
eliminate inflexible, outdated technologies.
The LifePRO product offers a Microsoft
development environment that we are
familiar with. It did not take us long to train
new staff on this product.”
Reduced Operating Costs
Since retiring its mainframes, Sentry is
saving money on a number of fronts,
including IT costs, labor costs, and product
development costs. “We need fewer people
to maintain LifePRO compared to the three
mainframe systems, saving us $300,000
annually,” says Schroeckenthaler. “We are
saving an additional $150,000 annually
through the reduction in CPU utilization
costs allocated to the life insurance
systems.”
“Today, product
development is back in
the hands of the
actuaries and product
managers."
Fred Schroeckenthaler, IT Director, Life &
Health, Sentry Insurance
Improved Access to Data, Business
Insight
Because Sentry has consolidated three life
insurance policy administration systems
into one, the number of integration points
between other Sentry enterprise
systems/reports and EXL LifePRO is
reduced by a third.
“It’s extremely easy to get data out of the
LifePRO system. The best thing is we only
have to build one connection point to
LifePRO instead of the three that we had to
build in the past, one for each mainframe
system,” says Schroeckenthaler.
Because of the interoperability between
EXL LifePRO and Excel spreadsheet
software, business users and executives
have self-service access to data for better
visibility into different lines of business.
They never had this opportunity before
because mainframe data extraction utilities
were inflexible; if a business employee
wanted a change in the report criteria, IT
had to make the change.
“Today business users can use LifePRO’s
extensive predefined queries to extract data
into Excel for trending analysis. The
actuaries can extract data related to a
specific product, a specific line of business,
or a specific status such as all the
terminated policies within the last five
years,” explains Schroeckenthaler.
Better Customer Service
Sentry customer service representatives no
longer have to tell the customers to wait
until the next day to get an accurate quote
for a policy change. The EXL LifePRO
system provides an accurate quote in realtime, so the customer service
representative can respond back to the
customer on the phone.
“In LifePRO, when you process something,
it will reflect that policy change
immediately,” says Schroeckenthaler.
“There are other capabilities within LifePRO
that we haven’t had the chance to deploy,
but we are looking at the APIs that would
enable customers to provide us with
contact information updates directly, or to
build a customer service website.”
“Looking back, it seems incredible that
Sentry took this step,” concludes
Schroeckenthaler. “There were many
people who thought we would never get
rid of the mainframe systems used to
administer the life policies. But with EXL
and Microsoft, we made this major
transition successfully, and there’s no
looking back.”
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft
products and services, call the Microsoft
Sales Information Center at (800) 4269400. In Canada, call the Microsoft
Canada Information Centre at (877) 5682495. Customers in the United States and
Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing
can reach Microsoft text telephone
(TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234.
Outside the 50 United States and
Canada, please contact your local
Microsoft subsidiary. To access
information using the World Wide Web,
go to:
www.microsoft.com
For more information about EXL Service
products and services, call (212) 2777100 or visit the website at:
www.exlservice.com
Microsoft Solutions for the Financial
Services Industry
Financial institutions continue to seek costeffective solutions that create rapid and
sustainable competitive advantage while
laying the groundwork for future
innovation. Microsoft and its ever-growing
partner community develop solutions that
meet the industry-specific needs of banks,
insurance companies, and capital markets
firms worldwide, and help financial services
customers realize their full potential.
For more information about Microsoft
solutions for the financial services industry,
go to:
www.microsoft.com/resources/
financialservices
For more information about Sentry
Insurance products and services, call
(800) 373-6879 or visit the website at:
www.sentry.com
Software and Services
Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
− Windows Server 2008 Enterprise
− Microsoft SQL Server 2008
 Microsoft Office
− Microsoft Office Professional 2007
 Microsoft Visual Studio
− Microsoft Visual Studio 2008
− Microsoft Visual Studio 2010


LifePRO is a registered trademark of EXL Service.
This case study is for informational purposes only.
MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published July 2011
Technologies
− Microsoft .NET Framework
Partner

EXL Service

Technolog
− Microso
Partner

EXL Servic