American Farmers and Ranchers Mutual Insurance
AFR Goes Live on Britecore in Seven Months
Speed to market was a primary focus.
Speed to market for new products and flexible, cost-effective operations were critical objectives for American Farmers and Ranchers Mutual Insurance Company (AFR) in their core systems environment.
Legacy systems were a barrier.
Legacy systems with limited functionality and a high cost of ownership had become a daunting barrier to their success. AFR knew they needed to replace their legacy system to remain competitive, but the recent failure of a modernization initiative had many in the company feeling skeptical about new projects. In fact, AFR had experienced seven separate modernization failures during the previous 20 years, with sunk costs totaling $35 million.
We combined our efforts.
AFR was determined to modernize successfully, utilizing best practices they had learned from past failures. They ruled out a number of top core systems providers due to limited cloud experience, a history of failed implementations, and inconsistent results with SI partners and outsourced development. Instead, AFR chose BriteCore, a modern, cloud-hosted core platform with an extremely high rate of successful implementations over its decade-long history.
AFR created a new agile team that worked alongside BriteCore and contributed directly to the platform's source code. Together, the teams proved a co-development philosophy that not only reshaped AFR, but also helped build BriteCore’s client developer program. The combined team delivered steady progress, addressed AFR’s needs, and rapidly built confidence, excitement, and support across the company.
Measuring Success
The BriteCore implementation was the core modernization win AFR needed. In contrast to prior modernization attempts, our collaborative team brought the Dwelling line live in less than seven months. Total investment was less than $500,000, or 0.4% of written premium. AFR credits the implementation’s success to three key factors:
Agile Processes
Agile processes, which were new to AFR, allowed the combined teams to focus on incremental delivery while progressively refining new targets and goals.
Platform Extension
Community source development enabled AFR to extend the base BriteCore platform and contribute new functionality without losing the benefit of managed upgrades.
Continuous Updates
Cloud deployment eliminates the need for costly infrastructure and enables continuous updates to the BriteCore platform, ensuring AFR has immediate access to new features.
