Case Rusnak Insurance Company

Case Write-Up: Rusnak Insurance Company

In the Rusnak Insurance Company case, Charles Rusnak, founder of the company finds his company in a dilemma. Initially, his company had blossomed into a profit making company seeing revenue increase each year. From 1990 to 1998 the company's net profit grew by 400%. In 1999, revenue started to slip, and instead of getting an increase, the company found itself at a decrease in revenue. The problem was that although Charles had upgraded his information system in 1994 adding more computers, applications, as well as receiving new users began to slow the system down as memory and disk space was reaching its capacity. The slow system response had its employees complaining and to add to that, accounting reports took two days to fulfill. The company's growth outgrew the company's system capacity and something had to be done.

Charles Rusnak, current president, is one of the founders and of the company along with David Fowler. Founded in 1984, the company joined with three other small local insurance agencies and grew rapidly. In 1998, David Fowler retired and Charles ended up taking his share of the company which gave him joint ownership.

Charles Rusnak does have the experience to perform the tasks of his job, since he has been with the company since its birth. He's experienced technical problems in the past with the company's information systems and has made decisions to upgrade before as well as add more PCs, therefore he is very well capable of handling big company decisions such as this.

The sales people have an automated application to help them situate their customers and their needs for the right insurance policy which is necessary since a lot of paperwork may be needed as well as documentation. All the sales person needs to do is type in customer information such as account number, type of coverage, policy number, primary insurance, billing account number etc. Once all that has been done, invoices and policies are then printed in a batch at the end of the day. One thing that I feel could have been improved about this setup is that maybe some of the underwriters can have access to the TCS software. This may decrease mistakes in information transfers form underwriters to the only data entry clerk available. I think this is crucial especially since Angela Harper and her boss are the only end users of the TCS system. If it can be done so that others have access to the system it can take off some of the load that Angela Harper has to deal with such as inputting large quantities of data, running all batch reports, and handling all the invoicing procedures.

The back-end operations the Rusnak office seems fair. However, there is definitely room for improvement. First, Charles Rusnak, the top guy in charge of the company and its systems has minimal knowledge of the TCS system that is used by the data entry clerk, Angela Harper. This as I mentioned in the above paragraph should not only be limited to the president. The systems should be educated throughout the whole operation from the back-end users to the front-end users so