What is Brylianze?

This is my introductory post. I want to give a brief overview of what our new company is all about and what our value proposition is.

First, let me explain what Brylianze is not. We are not a general outsourcing company that tries to be all things to all industries. We only focus on P&C insurance. That's it. Will we expand into other areas someday? Maybe, but I personally believe that the old saying "jack of all trades, master of none" applies in our industry. We want to be the best in our industry, period. No compromises.

Our mission is to rescue failing projects and get them back on track with as little pain and disruption as possible and to launch new projects properly and insure that they are implemented on schedule and within budget.

In my humble opinion, we have a delivery problem in our business. It's significant and getting worse as the years go by. Why is that? There are lots of reasons but the core issues are: too many vendors low balling initial pricing, lack of understanding of our business by IT Services vendors, not enough true industry experts, lack of governance process, major supply of good resources to demand imbalance, and resource turnover. There are too many deals out there that I have been following that end up costing two or three times as much as initially planned while the development timeline goes on far beyond the initial estimate. As I stated earlier, Brylianze is dedicated to getting failing projects back on track and helping new projects get off the ground smoothly.

I have found that generally, delivery problems have a proximate cause... the initial procurement process. Let's take a quick look at why.

Regarding services, today, there are so many IT services vendors that are wanting a piece of the system implementation pie that they are fragmenting the industry resources. No single vendor has enough good resources to do the job. Also, many vendors are quoting prices and timelines that are unreasonable if not impossible. Executives at insurance companies are expecting the chosen vendor to deliver at the price and timeline contracted and often believe that they can legally hold the vendor to the deal. But.... it rarely ends that way.

To continue, Insurance company executives often believe that only one vendor should be appointed to get the system implemented. This common belief is based on the economies of scale theory which is that "a proportionate savings in costs will be gained by an increased level of production." It would make sense that if you give a vendor a multi-million dollar deal, you will save costs but in truth this is not the case and it has a lot to do with the resource fragmentation that I mentioned.

Regarding system software, there are many excellent out of the box and integrated software systems. These systems combine policy, rating, billing, claims and data. Some offer hosting, cloud and on-premises licensing. They all work relatively well and some are better suited for various lines of business and insurance company size. The one big issue that I see is that there is too much customization after the purchase. You simply cannot go beyond a 10% delta of out of the box vs. customization. Yes, I know... the traditional expectation is 80/20 OOB vs. customization but this is not the case today. I will discuss why in another blog.

I think most of you already know that we have to contain the scope of our system implementation projects to be successful but rarely is the scope contained because basic project governance isn't followed after the project starts. Lack of governance allows project scope expansion and opens the path to project dissonance between the vendor(s) and the client. It's easy to fall into this trap of awarding the system implementation deal to one vendor then we allow them to govern their own suite of projects (often because we have a fixed bid deal with them). The insurance company has it's own governance team and the theory is that daily meetings and project sync up will keep everything on track. Rarely does this work. I discuss this in some other blogs.

If you have an ongoing project that you aren't feeling good about, Brylianze isn't a company that wants to come in and replace your vendor with its own resources. Instead, we want to rescue the project and make sure you get back on track. We will: evaluate the out of the box vs customization ratio; evaluate the team and skill sets (fix or supplement where necessary); evaluate the governance process and put a corrective process in place; re-negotiate the project timelines, costs and people allocated (if necessary); bring in additional resources as needed for other vendors or from our own pool; and work with your business to re-set expectations. If necessary, we can help you reboot the project but our goal is to get back on track with as little pain and disruption as possible. We'll be straight with you as to the project status and give you recommendations options.

If you are wanting to initiate a new system implementation project, we can: evaluate the software vendors to your particular business model and make a recommendation; develop requirements and gap those requirements to OOB functionality of the software vendor; evaluate SI's to implement your software; develop the governance model; and build your team using internal and external resources. We will negotiate pricing, contract terms and make sure that the vendors chosen will adhere to strict standards and delivery practices. Brylianze will take on the governance role over the entire project and potentially leverage the resources from one or more SI's. We will bring in experts to supplement the project team from Brylianze as needed.

Our pricing is a combination of extracting concessions from your existing IT Services vendors (as a percentage of project cost) and an hourly rate from the client. We are totally transparent about that. We will not take up-front payments from any vendor as some advisory firms do. This is inappropriate and makes any recommendation suspect. The process is transparent, logical and ethical. For direct staffing from Brylianze, our costs are on a T&M basis.

This is just a high level overview of our some of our key services. Call me at 623.628.7491 or email me at steve.addair@brylianze.com to discuss.

Brylianze Insurance Technology Services, Bright People / Smart Solutions.