If I purchase your products, what return on investment can I expect to see?
We believe it is important to take a granular approach to the development of the business case and overall return on investment. ROI is achieved with the ICE Product Suite as a result of speed of delivery, process efficiency gains, improved supplier management, superior fraud screening, increased customer retention and reduced support costs.
A recent case study with a customer calculated that the cost of ownership of ICE Claims over a four year period was no more than 14% of the identified savings in indemnity spend alone, not accounting for the anticipated savings in administration and subsequent reduction in staff numbers.
Are you solely UK focused?
No; we have customers in both Europe and Asia Pacific using the ICE product suite. The majority of our senior personnel have worked across the world on both policy and claims applications and are able to bring a depth of understanding often not found elsewhere.
Do I need to get my IT Department involved?
We created the ICE Product Suite to help remove the over-reliance on IT departments. Typically, configuration of ICE products is undertaken by business users: after all, they understand the business processes required and the environment in which they work and they become the system experts.
Given all the recent legislative changes and proposed reforms, how future-proof is the ICE product suite?
We are constantly monitoring the direction and drivers of the general insurance industry.
Our twice yearly user group provides an ideal forum to discuss the product roadmap and legislative reform. Our aim is to ensure that our products meet existing legislative requirements and are architected is such a way as to allow our customers to adopt new practices and processes resulting from new ones. This is achieved by simple user configuration, for example stage 1 of Ministry of Justice reforms.
Occasionally new industry interfaces are required and we have designed the ICE product set with open API’s to enable rapid connectivity.
How are upgrades to the core system affected?
Upgrades to ICE claims are released periodically. These upgrades can be applied without affecting your own local configuration.
How do I control an environment where users can make changes to workflow, tasks, products, priorities and reference data?
ICE Claims offer rigorous security and unique profiling of users ensuring only super users or non technical system administrators can change processes or reconfigure priorities. All such changes are fully audit trailed.
Whilst changes could be made to the live system without the need for downtime, configuration best practice dictates that changes and amendments are made in a controlled environment and thoroughly tested prior to the changes being promoted to the live system.
How do I know that you will understand our business?
For us this is a key differentiator. Our employees have over 200 man years of experience in the general insurance market between them. We understand your business and talk the same language you do. Whilst many of the processes worldwide are similar, we are continuously monitoring legislation and process reforms that ensure we deliver products able to provide a competitive advantage to your business.
How else could IT-Freedom help my business?
In addition to the ICE Product Suite, IT-Freedom is able to provide a number of complimentary services either directly, through customers or business partners. These services include: strategic insurance consulting, business process review and improvement, business case development, hosting and technology services and insurance outsourced services.
How long does a typical implementation project take?
We have commenced live running within four months of contract signature. ICE Claims comes complete with pre-defined screens, rules, workflow, tasks, workgroups, trigger points, Supplier portal, Policyholder portal, B2B portal etc. This is designed to enable a fast start to your own preferred configuration. We recognise that one size does not fit all and have provided a flexible framework which you can configure to meet your specific requirements.
What are your main markets?
We have three main markets already using our products: Insurance companies, Mutual insurers and Third Party Administrators who act on behalf of insurers.
What happens if I need to change my configuration or change my workflow?
Configuration changes can be made as and when required by appropriate users. Typically these changes are then tested in a user acceptance testing environment before being promoted to the live system.
What if I need to convert data from legacy systems?
IT-Freedom’s technical team has many years experience in data migration from single or multiple legacy systems. As a result we have a thorough understanding of the operational and technical issues related to this important component of a project. We apply a pragmatic approach to all aspects of data migration from jointly defining the data migration strategy with the customer at the outset through to on-going project management, data cleansing, migration and testing.
Whilst we recognise each customer is unique in their requirements, our preferred approach is to migrate data in stages, extracting data by predefined criteria such as scheme and status to minimise risk.
What type of experience do your employees have?
We employ seasoned professionals who have had previous experience of general insurance businesses. Many have previously worked in Claims or Underwriting departments and most have experience of many different claims and policy systems. We are rightly proud of our reputation of understanding your business and delivering quality implementations within agreed budget and timescales.
You state that your products are highly configurable. Does this mean I have to learn a programming language or understand xml to make changes?
No. Some organisations use the term configurable to mean programming. This is not the case with the ICE product suite. When we say something is configurable, we mean by the business, through the use of drop down values, radio buttons, check boxes and plain text.