So, do you need advanced risk management and claims administration software? Well, it depends.

It depends on:

• The complexities of an organization’s exposures
• Time spent manually managing risks like claims and policies
• How an organization is departmentalized and its interactivity with vendors

That's clear as mud, right?

When deciding on whether to invest in a RMIS or whether to keep grinding risk and insurance information in Excel, organizations need to ultimately consider the speed and accuracy at which they can maneuver within their risk, claims and insurance processes.

The difficulty level of a renewal is often a tell-tell sign of whether a RMIS would be of value or another expensive overhead. How much time are you spending reviewing, collecting and analyzing data to capture the total cost of risk, develop a basis to negotiate premiums, and guard against gaps or overlaps in coverage?

If your renewal process consists of one week of hammering out data and contemplating a single spreadsheet with approximately 40 annual claims or 10 properties, you can probably go forth and prosper with Excel.

You might consider a RMIS, however, if you have a large number of employees, locations and resulting claims; a lengthy renewal process because of multi-layered insurance programs or a high percentage of litigated claims; and difficult-to-access information because of a fragmented corporate infrastructure or reliance on third-party data. A modern RMIS should allow you to:

• View all your property value and exposure data in one place, along with related policies, claims, incidents, inspections, assets, fleet, certificates, and OSHA reports.
• Chart your insurance programs, model prospective programs, project cash-flow impact of retention options and benchmark your coverage.
• Easily collect and track exposures, calculate your organization's total cost of risk and automate the allocation process across the enterprise.

If these few of many RMIS capabilities seem like they could make a tremendous impact on your workload, renewals and cost of risk in general, then advanced software might be the answer.

But then again, it depends.