PROBLEM

A nationwide provider of crop insurance for farmers and landowners wanted to streamline policy information for their agents, providing them with technology and training to simplify the pricing, execution, and submission of policies to their clients.

SOLUTION

ADC developed and continues to enhance an application extension that integrates digital imagery, public land survey, and USDA FSA data from a geodatabase. With the extension, users generate insured fields by digitizing boundaries or importing predefined fields from FSA Common Land Unit layers. Users can then query the company’s database to confirm and apply policy-related properties as new fields are created, assuring the complex nature of ‘‘multiple shares in common ground’ is accurately represented and managed in the geodatabase.

More importantly, the extension provides a series of tools for exporting image snapshots of the insured fields and associated reference layers, organized by geography and policy, which are later integrated into a ‘map book’ with a policy information report, then easily printed and provided to the insured. The printed map books are a critical component of the company’s acreage reporting process, as each farmer and their agent reference the book in deciding and verifying the fields and acreage to be insured for a forthcoming crop cycle.

RESULTS

The ADC solution has resulted in increased data accuracy and productivity for the client’s insurance agents. In particular, the task of reissuing a policy’s “Schedule of Insurance,” required when changes are made to a policy, has been dramatically streamlined, resulting in savings of both staff time and mailing costs. Now, the staff levels necessary to create and maintain the company’s enterprise geodatabase have remained steady, despite the threefold increase in the amount of mapped policy land. ADC is currently assisting the company in implementing a similar toolset, to provide policy-field management at the local agent level.