From the tailgate to the carrier, without a second trip

The organisation

Halvorsen Claims Group is an independent adjusting firm with nine field adjusters covering five states. It works on assignment for four national carriers, weighted heavily toward property, with a surge in catastrophe work after storms.

Adjusters are in vehicles, not offices. The firm has one administrator and no premises to speak of beyond a mailbox and a server, and it treats that as a competitive advantage rather than a limitation.

The problem

An adjuster inspects, photographs, measures, and then produces a packet in whatever shape the assigning carrier wants it. Halvorsen works for four carriers and no two want the same thing. One wants a cover sheet with the claim number in a specific box at a specific size. One wants photographs four to a page with captions underneath. One wants them two to a page with captions beside. One will not accept a file with form fields still live in it.

The photographs were the bottleneck. Sixty to a hundred per claim, taken on a phone, needing to be captioned, placed on the carrier's layout, and — critically — presented in the order the inspection was walked rather than the order the camera happened to save them in. Roof, then elevations clockwise from the front, then interior room by room. The camera does not know that.

So every claim had two sessions. The inspection, and then an evening at a desk laying out photographs. The second session usually happened one to three days later, by which time the adjuster's memory of which photograph showed which elevation had gone soft, and captions got vaguer as a result. Vague captions produce carrier queries, and carrier queries produce a return visit.

What they tried first

The firm tried standardising on a single packet format and asking the carriers to accept it. Two did, tacitly. Two did not, and one of those two was the largest assigning source, so the idea died.

It then tried a photo-management application that could batch-caption and export a contact sheet. That solved the layout but not the cover sheet, and its export could not be flattened, so one carrier rejected every file it produced. The adjusters were now using two tools and still finishing at a desk.

The last attempt before the change was to hire a part-time administrator to build the packets from the adjusters' notes. That worked, in the sense that it moved the work off the adjusters. It also added a person to every claim, put a day of latency into the process and made the captions worse, because the person writing them had not been on the roof.

What changed

Each carrier is now a page template plus an export preset. The template carries the cover sheet with the fields left blank and the photo layout that carrier expects; the preset carries the export settings, including whether the file is flattened.

Photographs are dropped in as a batch and placed onto the template's grid in the order they were taken, which — because the adjuster walks the property in a fixed order — is already the order the carrier wants. Reordering is a drag when it is not. Captions are typed on the tablet, on site, while the adjuster is standing in front of the thing being captioned.

The cover sheet is filled in last, from the assignment, and the whole packet exports to the carrier's preset in one action.

How it was put in

Two adjusters piloted it for six weeks on a single carrier's assignments — deliberately the fussiest of the four, on the reasoning that a template that satisfied that carrier would satisfy the rest.

The templates were built by the firm's owner over two evenings, from packets that had already been accepted. Each one was checked by submitting a real claim and waiting to see whether it came back. Three came back; the third correction was cosmetic.

The remaining seven adjusters were brought over one carrier at a time rather than one adjuster at a time, so that at any point everybody was doing the same thing for a given assignment source. The whole transition took about four months and no adjuster had more than half a day of unfamiliar process.

The result

A packet takes about eleven minutes at the end of an inspection instead of an evening at a desk. Sixty-two claims a week now go out the day they are inspected.

The firm's own measure of the change is not the time. It is that carrier queries about photograph identification fell by roughly two-thirds, which they attribute entirely to captions being written on site. Fewer queries means fewer return visits, and a return visit costs a half-day and a tank of fuel.

The part-time administrator role was not eliminated. It was redirected onto assignment intake, which was the actual constraint once the packets stopped taking evenings.