CSE498, Collaborative Design, Spring 2019
Computer Science and Engineering
Michigan State University

Founded in 1916, Auto-Owners Insurance is a Fortune 500 company that provides auto, home, life and commercial insurance to more than four million policyholders.

One of its products is workers’ compensation insurance. Agents fill out applications for this insurance and submit them to be reviewed by an underwriter at Auto-Owners.

Frequently, the business name is entered differently than what the Secretary of State has on file. This can be caused by a slight variation in the business name or simply by a typo. Finding the official business name is time-consuming and not a productive use of an Auto-Owners associate’s valuable time.

Our Secretary of State (SoS) Software Robot automates this process, using what’s called robotic process automation, or RPA. With the click of a button, the software robot, or softbot, assumes the role of the insurance underwriter, searching first for the correct Secretary of State website, then searching for the proper name of the business.

Agents enter applications into the form provided on the website. Once submitted, underwriters can access applications for review from the web portal. After running the softbot, underwriters utilize the softbot’s results to finish the application review process and approve the application. To monitor how well the softbot is performing, there is a reporting dashboard that allows managers to view statistics and metrics captured during processing.

Our website is implemented in PHP and hosted on a CentOS Linux server. The community edition of UiPath was used to create our software robot.