Patent Issued for Source and manage supplier system and method (USPTO 11922508): United Services Automobile Association

2024 MAR 26 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Insurance Daily News -- From Alexandria, Virginia, NewsRx journalists report that a patent by the inventors Harding, Nathan Samuel (Austin, TX, US), Lee, Tasia Madrid (San Antonio, TX, US), Thiele, Erin Nichele (San Antonio, TX, US), filed on October 30, 2020, was published online on March 5, 2024.

The patent’s assignee for patent number 11922508 is United Services Automobile Association (San Antonio, Texas, United States).

News editors obtained the following quote from the background information supplied by the inventors: “The present disclosure relates generally to systems and methods for enhancing a sourcing and managing process of a supplier portfolio.

“In the insurance industry, claims, underwriting, competitive intelligence, product management, or other support functions for an insurance provider may be sourced by suppliers internal to the insurance provider or external to the insurance provider. Oftentimes, the value of the contracts that are executed may not be fully realized due to expensive oversight, various clauses in the contracts, or other factors. In some instances, focusing on an individual step in a source and manage process or reducing oversight of a specific contract may help realize value of the contract. However, it is now recognized that there is a need for enhancing the sourcing and managing process for a supplier, particularly in the property and casualty space.”

As a supplement to the background information on this patent, NewsRx correspondents also obtained the inventors’ summary information for this patent: “One or more specific embodiments of the present disclosure will be described below. In an effort to provide a concise description of these embodiments, all features of an actual implementation may not be described in the specification. It should be appreciated that in the development of any such actual implementation, as in any engineering or design project, numerous implementation-specific decisions must be made to achieve the developers’ specific goals, such as compliance with system-related and business-related constraints, which may vary from one implementation to another. Moreover, it should be appreciated that such a development effort might be complex and time consuming, but would nevertheless be a routine undertaking of design, fabrication, and manufacture for those of ordinary skill having the benefit of this disclosure.

“Present embodiments are directed toward systems, methods, and applications for enhancing a sourcing and managing process for a portfolio of property and casualty suppliers. Although the following discussion relates to property and casualty insurance, it should be appreciated that the techniques may be used with any type of insurance. The property and casualty sourcing and managing process for suppliers may refer to a process from a sourcing designation internal to an insurance provider through leveraging suppliers to fulfill property and casualty and enterprise objectives. The techniques disclosed herein attempt to ensure value is realized from contracts within a supplier portfolio of the insurance provider while not eroding the value of the contracts through expensive oversight. Some embodiments may aggregate the contracts to enable analysis at the supplier portfolio level and some embodiments may analyze the contracts at an individual level. Further, the enhanced sourcing and managing processes may include techniques applicable to internal suppliers and external suppliers. Internal suppliers may refer to suppliers that are affiliates (e.g., business partner) with the insurance provider and may provide a service that generates an expense for the consumer of that service. In contrast, external suppliers may refer to suppliers that are not affiliates.

“In some embodiments, the sourcing and managing suppliers process may provide end-to-end analysis from obtaining sourcing designations to determining viability of the designations, procuring a contract related to the designations, implementing objectives in the contract, managing the supplier of the service and/or product described in the contract, and determining whether to renew, modify, or terminate the contract. Data may be obtained throughout the process to enable historical analysis to identify strengths and weaknesses of the specifics in each of the contracts in the supplier portfolio to enable better sourcing decisions to be made in the future. Accordingly, some embodiments aggregate information within a sourcing portfolio and use systems to smartly collect data for assessing additional opportunities or reassessing current sourcing. Further, the techniques may compare various factors of the internal supplier process versus the external supplier process, such as how much each process would cost, how long each process would take, how much risk each process entails, and the like. Based on the comparison, the techniques may select and/or recommend either the internal supplier or the external supplier to provide the sourcing. As such, some embodiments provide a holistic view of the supplier portfolio and allow for triggers to be used to focus efforts on opportunities and to enable realization of value in supplier relationships. Additionally, the techniques may allow oversight to be cost effective from a consumer perspective and may facilitate regulatory compliance, among other things.

“With the foregoing in mind, FIG. 1 is a block diagram of components of a system 10 that uses a property and casualty source and manage application 12 (referred to as “the application 12” herein), in accordance with embodiments described herein. As depicted, the system 10 may include a computing device 14 communicatively coupled to one or more servers 16 and/or one or more databases 18. The computing device 14 may be a personal computer, a tablet, a laptop, a smartphone, a server, or the like. The computing device 14 may include a processor 20, a memory 22, and a communication component 24. The communication component 24 may be a wireless or wired communication component that may facilitate communication between the computing device 14 and the one or more servers 16 and/or the computing device 14 and the one or more databases 18.

“The processor 20 may be any type of computer processor or microprocessor capable of executing computer-executable code. The processor 20 may also include multiple processors that may perform the operations described below. The memory 22 may be any suitable articles of manufacture that can serve as media to store processor-executable code, data, or the like. These articles of manufacture may represent computer-readable media (e.g., any suitable form of memory or storage) that may store the processor-executable code used by the processor 20 to perform the presently disclosed techniques. For example, as depicted, the memory 22 may store the processor-executable code that implements the application 12. It should be understood that the application 12 may be implemented as a software program, a service, a website, an application programming interface (API), or the like. Also, although the application 12 is shown as stored on the memory 22, it should be understood that the application 12 may reside in one or more memories of the servers 16 or may be distributed between the memory 22 of the computing device and one or more memories of the servers 16.”

The claims supplied by the inventors are:

“1. A system, comprising: a plurality of sensors configured to be located at a plurality of properties; and a processor operatively coupled to a memory storing instructions configured to cause the processor to: receive a plurality of sourcing designations for a plurality of property and casualty insurance claims for the plurality of properties, wherein at least some of the plurality of sourcing designations are provided by the plurality of sensors located at the plurality of properties; and in response to receipt of the plurality of sourcing designations: filter the plurality of sourcing designations to assemble a plurality of like-kind sourcing designations from the plurality of sourcing designations; evaluate a respective risk level, a respective cost, or both for each of a plurality of suppliers correlated with an ability to address the plurality of like-kind sourcing designations; identify a recommended supplier of the plurality of suppliers to address the plurality of like-kind sourcing designations based on the respective risk level, the respective cost, or both for each of the plurality of suppliers; and generate a contract indicating at least one of the plurality of property and casualty insurance claims for use with the recommended supplier of the plurality of suppliers.

“2. The system of claim 1, wherein the instructions are configured to cause the processor to instruct a communication device to transmit the contract to a supplier computing device of the recommended supplier in response to generation of the contract.

“3. The system of claim 2, comprising the supplier computing device, wherein the supplier computing device is configured to provide an alert in response to receipt of the contract, to open an application to facilitate review of the contract in response to the receipt of the contract, or both.

“4. The system of claim 1, wherein the instructions are configured to cause the processor to: evaluate the respective risk level and the respective cost for each of the plurality of suppliers correlated with the ability to address the plurality of like-kind sourcing designations; and identify the recommended supplier of the plurality of suppliers based on the respective risk level and the respective cost for each of the plurality of suppliers.

“5. The system of claim 1, wherein the instructions are configured to cause the processor to: determine the respective risk level for each of the plurality of suppliers based on historical data related to previous contracts for previous sourcing designations that were fulfilled by the plurality of suppliers; evaluate the respective risk level for each of the plurality of suppliers; and identify the recommended supplier of the plurality of suppliers based on the respective risk level for each of the plurality of suppliers.

“6. The system of claim 1, wherein the plurality of sensors is configured to detect water leaks at the plurality of properties.

“7. The system of claim 1, wherein the plurality of sourcing designations is representative of a presence of water, fire, wind, hail, or any combination thereof, at the plurality of properties.

“8. The system of claim 1, wherein at least some of the plurality of sourcing designations comprise respective text data, and the instructions are configured to cause the processor to filter the plurality of sourcing designations to assemble the plurality of like-kind sourcing designations by matching words in the respective text data.

“9. The system of claim 1, wherein the instructions are configured to cause the processor to: terminate the contract based on a change in the respective risk level of the recommended supplier, a change in the respective cost of the recommended supplier, or both, during fulfillment of the contract by the recommended supplier, and generate a termination agreement in response to termination of the contract.

“10. A system, comprising: a plurality of sensors configured to be located at a plurality of properties; and a processor operatively coupled to a memory storing instructions configured to cause the processor to: receive a plurality of sourcing designations for a plurality of property and casualty insurance claims for the plurality of properties, wherein at least some of the plurality of sourcing designations are provided by the plurality of sensors located at the plurality of properties; and in response to receipt of the plurality of sourcing designations: filter the plurality of sourcing designations to assemble a plurality of like-kind sourcing designations from the plurality of sourcing designations; determine a first risk level, a first cost, or both for a first supplier to address the plurality of like-kind sourcing designations; determine a second risk level, a second cost, or both for a second supplier to address the plurality of like-kind sourcing designations; select the first supplier to address the plurality of like-kind sourcing designations based on a comparison of the first risk level to the second risk level, the first cost to the second cost, or both; and generate a contract indicating at least one of the plurality of property and casualty insurance claims for use with the first supplier to address the plurality of like-kind sourcing designations.

“11. The non-transitory computer readable medium of claim 10, wherein the instructions are configured to cause the processor to instruct a communication device to transmit the contract to a first supplier computing device of the first supplier in response to generation of the contract.

“12. The non-transitory computer readable medium of claim 10, wherein the instructions are configured to cause the processor to: filter the plurality of sourcing designations to assemble a plurality of other like-kind sourcing designations from the plurality of sourcing designations; determine a third risk level, a third cost, or both for a third supplier to address the plurality of other like-kind sourcing designations; determine a fourth risk level, a fourth cost, or both for a fourth supplier to address the plurality of other like-kind sourcing designations; select the third supplier to address the plurality of other like-kind sourcing designations based on a comparison of the third risk level to the fourth risk level, the third cost to the fourth cost, or both; and generate an additional contract indicating at least one of the plurality of property and casualty insurance claims for use with the third supplier to address the plurality of other like-kind sourcing designations.

“13. The non-transitory computer readable medium of claim 10, wherein the plurality of sourcing designations comprises water damage sourcing designations and non-water damage sourcing designations, and the instructions are configured to cause the processor to filter the plurality of sourcing designations to assemble the water damage sourcing designations as the plurality of like-kind sourcing designations.

“14. The non-transitory computer readable medium of claim 10, wherein the plurality of sourcing designations comprises water damage sourcing designations and fire damage sourcing designations, and the instructions are configured to cause the processor to filter the plurality of sourcing designations to assemble the water damage sourcing designations as the plurality of like-kind sourcing designations and to assemble the fire damage sourcing designations as a plurality of other like-kind sourcing designations.

“15. The non-transitory computer readable medium of claim 10, wherein at least some of the plurality of sourcing designations comprise respective text data, and the instructions are configured to cause the processor to filter the plurality of sourcing designations to assemble the plurality of like-kind sourcing designations by matching words in the respective text data.

“16. A method, comprising: detecting, using a plurality of sensors located at a plurality of properties, a plurality of sourcing designations; receiving, at a processor, the plurality of sourcing designations for a plurality of property and casualty insurance claims for the plurality of properties; in response to receiving the plurality of sourcing designations, executing steps comprising: filtering, using the processor, the plurality of sourcing designations to assemble a plurality of like-kind sourcing designations from the plurality of sourcing designations; evaluating, using the processor, a respective risk level, a respective cost, or both for each of a plurality of suppliers correlated with an ability to address the plurality of like-kind sourcing designations; identifying, using the processor, a recommended supplier of the plurality of suppliers to address the plurality of like-kind sourcing designations based on the respective risk level, the respective cost, or both for each of the plurality of suppliers; and generating, using the processor, a contract indicating at least one of the plurality of property and casualty insurance claims for use with the recommended supplier of the plurality of suppliers.

“17. The method of claim 16, wherein at least some of the plurality of sourcing designations comprise respective text data, and the method comprises filtering, using the processor, the plurality of sourcing designations to assemble the plurality of like-kind sourcing designations via matching words in the respective text data.”

For additional information on this patent, see: Harding, Nathan Samuel. Source and manage supplier system and method. U.S. Patent Number 11922508, filed October 30, 2020, and published online on March 5, 2024. Patent URL (for desktop use only): https://ppubs.uspto.gov/pubwebapp/external.html?q=(11922508)&db=USPAT&type=ids

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