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Good morning. Welcome to another video blog by Fortress Technology Planners. Today we are going to continue
our series on IT products. We'll be talking about Xactimate. Xactimate is an insurance claims
and administration software developed by a company called Xactware. If you are in
Canada, and you are involved with the insurance industry, then you probably are already familiar
with Xactimate. Xactimate is the industry de facto standard for electronic claims estimating.
Most of the larger players of insurance companies require that companies that they are going to work with
in terms of claims fulfillment, in terms of completing those claims, and the work involved,
will develop their estimates for the work involved and submit those estimates using
the Xactimate software. As a small or medium-sized business owner in Alberta that really puts
you in a position of: you need this software to run your business and you don't have a
heck of a lot of choice here based on just how the market has behaved and, as I said, made this
the de facto standard application. There are many different versions of Xactimate that
are available, depending on the size of your organization and the markets that you're working
with. You may want to choose a different version. Also, you have to consider how mobile are your
staff? Are you working from a centralized location, or are you having people on laptops
and tablets moving around into different sites and different locations. Another important
consideration for Xactimate is what scope are you going to use it for? You do have no
choice and you are going to be using to create your estimates and to send those into the
insurance company. But Xactimate does have some features that allow you to manage your projects
and jobs and administer those claims as they move forward. You have to
take a look at those features to see if they operationally fit with the needs of your organization
and whether it makes sense for you to use those features of the application or pursue
a different solution in terms of your project costing, your timesheets, your work orders
and so forth. Xactimate is a specialized application. This isn't application that a standard office
user is going to walk in here and start using this thing and be effective with it. Definitely we would recommend
that you would pursue some training for your staff so that they become familiar with it and
comfortable with it and effective. Again, these are your estimates and your estimates are effectively
bids and your sales quotations, so if they're not done properly or getting the best price,
let's say, then you have the opportunity to lose that claim to one of your competitors.
From an IT perspective, one of the major things they need to concern yourself with Xactimate is
the deployment. You have different versions, how are people to communicate with one another and always,
of course, where the data can be stored? Is it going to be on a whole bunch of local machines or in a centralized
location. Making sure that you have proper backups and proper reliability for your information.
This has been Jonathan Nituch from Fortress Technology Planners. We are an IT support company in Calgary.
We will speak to you tomorrow.