Who do you trust when the unexpected occurs? For the policyholders at West Bend Insurance Company, that’s an easy question to answer.

For more than 130 years, West Bend has provided insurance for homes, autos, and businesses through its strong agency relationships, building trust with policyholders through fast, fair claim service and ethical underwriting.

Using available data to set premium rates is central to the work of insuring. But without the technology to process that data, actuaries are left making educated guesses.

Recognizing that, West Bend set out to leverage its data to deliver the most accurate, up-to-date estimates to its policyholders. To do so, the company needed to step up its tech stack, migrating from on-premises data and end-of-life programs to a cutting-edge cloud ecosystem.

West Bend’s IT team called in a vendor to assist in the migration but faced culture-fit problems. The vendor insisted on a waterfall approach and did not embed its consultants in West Bend, resulting in friction and turmoil. West Bend had no choice but to end the relationship and seek out a different kind of consultancy. That’s when it called Slalom.

Moving on to a new partnership with Slalom was simple enough. But arriving in the wake of the previous troubled partnership meant the Slalom team needed to demonstrate our people-first approach right away.

“West Bend is a relationship company,” says Dan Gallegos, West Bend’s assistant vice president of information technology. “Everything we do starts with an agent selling our policies. We take that relationship culture, and we extend it to our associates, our customers, as well as our vendors. I felt that Slalom presented itself as an organization that wanted a long-term relationship, not just a short-term contractual win.”

So what did it look like to build trust with West Bend? “Actually being there on the ground, being with them day-to-day, working alongside their engineers, upskilling them and also ourselves really made that trust grow, to the point that we have become real strategic partners,” says Vamsi Kurakula, Slalom senior consultant. “We really had to earn that trust.”

Adds Matthew Byun, Slalom senior consultant, “We work with their teams every day. And as we’re doing this, we build ownership within the individual teams that we work with and upskill those team members that are part of the process. Our teams stay in close contact through every step of the engagement, and together, we’re co-creating solutions through an integrated Agile delivery approach.”

“The Slalom team are hard workers,” says Tyler Lewis, an IT director focused on data at West Bend. “They have good ideas and industry perspective. They challenge us appropriately. They coach us on technology, trends, and best practices. I would say it’s been a very, very good partnership.” 

To process complex actuarial datasets and produce reliably precise predictions, a partnership of compatible technologies was required. “It’s taking those existing data processes using Databricks for ingestion, loading that into a data lake on Microsoft Azure storage, transforming that data in Snowflake, and then visualizing it in Power BI,” explains Byun. “West Bend now has a modern tech stack that’s able to scale insights to the needs of its business.” 

“We were looking to get five years’ worth of general liability rate-making quality data at 99.99% financial accuracy ingested into Snowflake, for all of our actuarial and product management needs,” Gallegos explains. “And that’s what we did.”

The result? Accurate risk data that benefits policyholders, both in the event of an emergency and as owners of the business.

“We are a mutual company—we are owned by our customers,” says Lewis. “And we are in the business of helping those customers. The worst brings out our best. I love that we’re able to help people. To accurately price risk is core to our insurance operations, to keeping our promise to help all our customers.”

Up next, West Bend is bringing this increased level of accuracy in ratemaking to more policyholders, starting with commercial property insurance, which has more complex datasets.

Meanwhile, West Bend and Slalom continue to deepen the partnership, finding new ways for Slalom to support the insurer. 

“We’ve had Slalom present three times at our internal IT conferences in the last three years,” says Gallegos. “One time on how to have a product mindset to really help our product owners and business analysts and engineering. Then on design thinking and how to change the way we do engineering projects. And third on how to grow our AI platform. Vendor partners need to focus on business development, but I need them to do things just because it’s the right thing to do. Slalom does that all the time.”