Automation to Everywhere: What OpCon’s Guidewire Integration Means for Insurers

Modernization is a key focus across the insurance industry—insurers’ technology and IT spending is expected to increase by more than 25% between 2022 and 2026, in line with an established trend of rising IT costs driven by system modernization.

But many insurers have yet to see the return they expected from tech investments. Despite migrating a portion of workloads to the cloud, around 80% of insurance CIOs haven’t attained the level of agility or business benefits they sought from modernization.

The complexity of the current environment ranks among the most common reasons that modernization efforts haven’t paid off as expected. This is a familiar challenge for many insurers; even if digital transformation is well underway, it’s almost impossible to completely eliminate the use of legacy systems, and the poor interoperability of hybrid environments creates more work for IT teams—not less.

A new partnership between SMA Technologies and Guidewire allows insurers to address their transformation objectives by unlocking the full value of their investments, improving employee experience, and driving efficiencies that impact customers.

What is the purpose of OpCon's Guidewire integration?

Guidewire’s modern core systems, digital capabilities, and analytics enable growth for some of the largest and most recognizable P&C insurance players, but the level of automation provided by these systems alone is a vital first step—not a stride across the finish line. OpCon’s Guidewire integration maximizes automation potential, so insurance companies unlock the full value of their modern core systems.

Guidewire’s InsuranceSuite products allow users to build batch processes within their environments, but scheduling capabilities are limited and workflows that move between disparate systems and third-party applications encounter breakpoints that require manual intervention.

By integrating Guidewire into OpCon, insurers can automate and orchestrate their batch process scheduling and coordinate task requirements across systems and applications, allowing the automation of dependent tasks within workflows from a single point of control.

How does the integration work?

OpCon and Guidewire communicate through an agent, using asynchronous Rest API calls. OpCon can integrate with cloud-ready versions of PolicyCenter, BillingCenter, and ClaimCenter, enabling a central command hub for all InsuranceSuite processes.

Once Guidewire agents are created in OpCon, available batch processes are retrieved from Guidewire and added to a drop-down list for users to choose from when building a job. If the batch process allows the specification of arguments, they can be defined in OpCon.

Key capabilities of this integration include:

• Create connections to Guidewire’s BillingCenter, ClaimCenter, and PolicyCenter.
• Schedule, orchestrate, and track the status of batch processes.
• Coordinate and automate complex workflows to close out daily, weekly, and monthly processes.
• Define and submit arguments against any Guidewire batch processes that allow argument specification.
• Optimize workflows and avoid inefficiencies to speed up dependent processing.

What are the benefits of integrating Guidewire into OpCon?

OpCon provides a single point of control for scheduling, orchestrating, tracking, and enhancing any Guidewire-dependent process—even when they span disparate systems and applications.

OpCon’s robust scheduling and orchestration capabilities allow IT teams to take a hands-off approach to workflows that previously required significant manual effort. By harmonizing modern and legacy systems and creating a central hub for managing processes, OpCon drives efficiencies that benefit IT teams and customers alike.

Given that roughly half of all insurance professionals are set to retire in less than 15 years, insurers must improve employee experience to reduce turnover and attract new talent. By eliminating manual tasks that machines should handle, insurers free staff to focus on higher-level objectives. And behind-the-scenes efficiencies don’t exist in a vacuum—more streamlined processing benefits customers, too.

Since OpCon communicates with Guidewire, legacy systems, and external applications, this integration helps insurers unlock the captive value of their technology investments by simplifying complex environments and easing burdensome IT workloads.

OpCon’s integration is now available on the Guidewire Marketplace. Visit the integration page to learn more about how OpCon enables even greater value from Guidewire.