by Justin Lankes
9. March 2010 18:48
A lot of people ask us where we came from and how we got started so here's the abridged version of the story:
A website and web-based application design company - through various connections in the Special Investigations world we were commissioned to build and design a case management system from scratch for West Bend Mutual Insurance (WBMI) out of West Bend WI. We gained insight to how a Special Investigations Unit (SIU) is run by some of the most respected SIU personnel in the business. We worked shoulder to shoulder and discussed how this application should work and what it means to the company as a whole.
The SIU at WBMI uses vendors to conduct various aspects of investigations so we had to have internal staff and external companies collaborate on investigations using a common platform. Of couse, we went with a browser-based application built in JAVA so users could log in from anywhere with secure accress to the internet. After 12 months the first version was released to the company and it's vendors.
As WBMI and it's vendors used the application requests for upgrades and additional features began rolling in. Based on this feedback we prioritized feature development and released updated versions periodically over night without any disruption to service. After some time, when we felt the system was robust enough and could be applied to other SIU environments we went tested the waters in the market.
Soon, Swiss Re signed on and we began building a few custom features to better suit their SIU environment. Shortly after this success we brought in a user interface expert to redesign the asthetics of of the application (then called SIU Manager) for better usability. This is about the time I was hired in. The team and rebranded the company and product and SCOUT was born. New business cards, catalogs, trade show booth, everything. Our coming out party was the International Association of Special Investigations Units (IASIU) 2008 in Atlanta.
Below a photo of our original trade show booth, a magazine ad from Risk and Insurance and the homepage of our first website.
Risk&Insurance_ad_wcrops.pdf (10.02 mb)
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