Where they were
Cadence spent more than a decade building a large insurance sales network. It sells through branches across the country, a large agent base and corporate partners. Volume was high and still growing, but the systems handling that volume had not kept up.
Agents and branches sent in new business in different ways and different formats. The team that checks and prices each policy often received incomplete information, and had to go back for missing documents. Staff re-entered the same data by hand. Management could see how much business was coming in, but not how much had been issued, corrected or paid. Each of those sat in a different place.
What we did
The work established a standard intake, a visible nine-stage policy workflow, correction-aware reporting, and payment tracking, while giving Cadence a documented brief for whichever system came next.
Starting with a form instead of a new system
Cadence was considering a new CRM or ERP. We advised against starting there. A system migration would take months, and the company had not yet documented its own process well enough to specify what it needed. We built a simple online form and a linked working sheet instead. It went live in two weeks. The plan was to run the process properly first, then use what we learned as the brief for whatever system came later.
Standardising how new business is sent in
The form captured everything needed to price and issue a policy in one go: the customer, what was being insured, how much it was insured for, the price and the agent. It also required the supporting documents to be attached at the same time, so files arrived complete instead of being chased afterwards. Every form fed automatically into a shared working sheet. Business sent in any other way was not accepted.
Adding a workflow the team could see
A shared sheet alone would not fix coordination, so we built a workflow on top of it. Each policy moved through a fixed list of nine stages, and each stage showed whether it counted toward the daily sales report. Review notes, policy number and payment status became fields with a named owner, rather than messages between staff. Branch and channel names came from a set list, so the same branch could not be recorded three different ways. Managers saw only their own business.
Fixing how sales were counted and reported
The daily report counted every form once. That became a problem when agents sent in corrected forms, because the same policy could be counted twice, or counted at its old values. We tagged each form as either a first version or a correction, and linked it to a fixed reference for the item insured. The report then counted only the latest correct version of each policy. We also built reporting to answer questions a single sales total could not: how much business arrived correctly the first time, which branches and agents created the most repeat work, and how sales differed by product and channel.
Tracking payment alongside the policy
An insurance agency can owe the insurer before the customer has paid it. Payment therefore needed to sit with the policy, rather than in a separate accounts process. We added payment status to the policy record, and set out a daily check comparing what had been issued against what had been paid, with one person responsible for it. We also proposed a clear rule for cancelling policies that stayed unpaid.
Where they are now
The form went live two weeks after the decision to build it, and became the standard way new business was sent in, across both branches and agents. It went through four versions as the team used it. Cadence's own staff connected its output directly to the daily sales report, and the new process became a standing item in monthly management meetings.
Cadence now has a single record of how new business moves through the company. Management can see what has been sent in, what has been issued, what has been corrected and what has been paid, in one place. The company also has a documented process it can hand to whichever system it chooses next, without having had to commit to a platform first.
Cadence now has a single record of how new business moves through the company.