Our Services for Brokers

The first step is to establish the areas where you are having difficulty in delivering services or solutions. Speak to the appropriate areas of your business to ascertain where their particular blockers are and determine whether additional dedicated e-Zee resource could provide the impetus you need.

Look at the deliverables and establish the priority order. The UK Insurance market is a dynamic environment and there is always pressure to have a product or service operational or available within a very tight deadline. This will determine where additional e-Zee resource can have the biggest impact.

With all this information to hand you are now in a position to approach e-Zee and under the umbrella of a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) engage in informal discussions about where e-Zee can provide the most appropriate personnel to engage with your resources.

With a clear view of blockers and priorities and the informal financial input from e-Zee you are in a much better position to produce a cost benefit analysis that, with e-Zee as your ally, should be well received by your board.

Should you wish to proceed, e-Zee will provide you with a formal proposal featuring the scope of works, consultancy rates and the expenses. This will need to be signed by both parties before e-Zee commence any work. The extent of the proposal will be determined by the amount and quality of preparation you have undertaken to date.

It might be worth noting that e-Zee is experienced in all aspect of system implementation, from data mapping and migration to system configuration. Our Project & Implementation Management factsheet may be useful. If you are having bespoke products created for delegated authority products and require assistance with either creating or testing these products (for your back-office or web solutions), please also have a look at our Product Building Services and Testing Services factsheets.

The first thing to do is establish exactly what your new solution needs to do. e-Zee can run a series of workshops with each of your teams, such as finance, marketing or renewal processing. e-Zee will ask detailed questions in each workshop to extract the requirements. We say: “You don’t know what you don’t know”. It is too easy to set your requirements around what you have today and not what your business needs from the new solution.

e-Zee will create a full ITT for submission from the output of the fact finding workshops. This document will contain sections ranging from corporate information about the responding supplier to specific sections for each functional area. The actual ITT can be created with automatic scoring to give an instant view of the results. This scoring will also be weighted to give a clear view of the best matches by section. We also recommend that manual adjustments/overrides be included to give you the opportunity to evaluate the responses and adjust the scoring where necessary.

e-Zee can help recommend the most suitable software suppliers to submit your ITT to. E-Zee has worked with all the main suppliers and has an excellent feel for the market. Having created a target list, eZee can even handle the submission process and responses to all supplier questions. E-Zee essentially handles this time consuming process until the closure date when all submissions must be received.

Once all submissions are received, e-Zee can collate into a single working document with the scoring presented for comparison. The result will allow you to see which supplier is best suited overall or look at specific sections, such as renewal processing. We also recommend flagging questions as “general” and “must have”. We can then additionally rate each supplier by these categories. This step will lead to a short list of suppliers to proceed with.

For your short list, demonstrations and workshops need to be arranged. eZee can liaise with the suppliers and co-ordinate these activities and even attend with you if required. You never know, we might ask questions you hadn’t thought of

When you receive proposals and pricing from your short listed suppliers, we can help review these with you. There are many things to consider from the basis of licensing (are they rental or in perpetuity), to services rates and the process for system upgrades or charges for bespoke development. A view on the overall costs and payment profiles may be useful to you.

Once you have made your final selection, e-Zee can also review the contract for you. Although you should have this document reviewed by your solicitor it may be useful to have a view on the implications of the terms included.

You will now be moving forward to implementation. It might be worth noting that e-Zee is experienced in all aspect of system implementation, from data mapping and migration to system configuration. Our Project & Implementation Management factsheet may be useful. If you are having bespoke products created for delegated authority and require assistance with either creating or testing these products (for your back-office or web solutions), please also have a look at our Product Building Services and Testing Services factsheets.

Whatever information you have we can work with. What are your frustrations, needs, desires and what is the impact of these on your business plans? We can create a process and plan to make sure that you are getting the attention you deserve from your supplier.

The first thing we will do is detail all your frustrating problems and issues. This is something that isn’t always readily available. We will speak to all areas of your business to ascertain their particular headaches and allocate each problem to a category – software functionality e.g. the accounts won’t balance, software performance, the quotes engine is slow or software house service level - they never respond to e-mails or calls.

The next thing we will look at is your contract(s) to determine just what you have actually signed. Software contracts are generally biased towards the software house, so limits of indemnity will be minimal and they will not be responsible for any errors in the software or any consequential loss. There should, however, be a warranty that states that the software will perform in accordance with the specification and there should also be a service level associated with problems and incidents. The contract is important as that is where the culture of the software house is reflected.

Having studied the contract we will have better idea of what you are up against so it now time to start prioritising your problems and issues in the order of financial impact / compliance requirements or business growth. To start with we will focus on items that evidently cost you money – direct costs such as system downtime or special rates not contained in quote engine. Then start looking at your processes and try and determine the indirect (or invisible) costs to your business e.g. do your printers produce duplex output? How long does it take to close the month/year end accounts?

It’s often an isolated existence for insurance brokers but a problem shared is a problem halved as the saying goes. Many of your competitors will be experiencing the same problems as you and may have secured a solution or a work-round. It’s therefore a good idea to go and visit one of your competitors using the same software and talk. They will be more than happy to share their experiences with you and you may even acquire an ally in your tussles with your the software house.

You will now be moving forward to achieving results. It might be worth noting that e-Zee is experienced in all aspect of system implementation, from data mapping and migration to system configuration. Our Project & Implementation Management factsheet may be useful. If you are having bespoke products created for delegated authority products and require assistance with either creating or testing these products (for your backoffice or web solutions), please also have a look at our Product Creation and Testing factsheet.

Before being appointed e-Zee will provide you with a formal proposal featuring the scope of works, consultancy rates and the expenses plus a contract.