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Monday, Mar 18, 2024
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Executive Q&A: Alex Sun

Mitchell was founded by Glenn Mitchell in 1946 in a garage in the Clairemont Mesa neighborhood here in San Diego; the company has deep roots in the community. Mitchell started by creating first lists, then manuals with car parts numbers. Eventually the company moved to digital solutions and expanded its footprint to serve both claims organizations and collision repair facilities.

Today, Mitchell International provides software, expert services and connectivity solutions to the Property & Casualty insurance industry and collision repair facilities. Its clients include the majority of top 25 insurance payers, 30,000 collision repair facilities and 65,000 pharmacies. Mitchell has about 5,000 associates located throughout the U.S. and Canada, and its solutions are critical to accurately and efficiently process insurance claims related to an auto or a workplace accident.

Alex Sun joined the company in 2001 as CFO. He has been CEO since 2008. During this time, the company has strategically enhanced and expanded its solutions and service offerings while experiencing steady growth.

It was recently reported that you partnered with Qualcomm to work on smart glasses for auto repair. Do you often partner or are most of your advances made in-house?

The claims process is rapidly growing in complexity. Being able to fulfill our mission to get someone back in their car after an accident or back to pre-injury health following an auto or workplace accident would not be possible without a firm commitment to technology innovation and open partnerships. Given our role in support of this process, we must constantly invest in building high-quality solutions internally in addition to partnering well across the property and casualty ecosystem and with other technology providers. This includes innovation-driven efforts with world-class technology leaders like Qualcomm and Google, where we marry our deep industry expertise and systems knowledge with their domain expertise, be it machine learning or in the case of Qualcomm, extended reality. Partnering is part of Mitchell’s DNA, and we truly believe in bringing all parties together to foster open collaboration and better serve our industry.

Who is your main competition, and where would you rank Mitchell in the sector?

Mitchell has numerous lines of business. We serve the auto physical damage, auto casualty, workers’ compensation, pharmacy and disability claims markets, as well as collision repair facilities. Across each of these areas, we have a variety of competitors. Our main points of differentiation lie in the breadth of our solutions offering as well as our ability to deliver them at scale.

So presently is the company more focused on expanding its footprint or refining its current solutions?

We are focused on both expanding our footprint and refining our current solutions. The work we do today is vital to the operations of our clients. The expectation is that we are always improving, both in terms of the technology we offer and in the deep industry expertise we provide. We invest heavily in improving our technology and services stack through ongoing investments in user experience, analytics, infrastructure and the cloud, among other areas. In addition, in our mission to extend the impact that we have on the success of our clients, we continue to identify other areas of the claims process where we believe we can improve outcomes and thoughtfully broaden into those areas.

I see that you are hiring. How is business?

Mitchell serves a large, diverse market: auto casualty, workers’ compensation, pharmacy and auto physical damage claims organizations, as well as collision repair facilities. We also offer clinical services tied to property & casualty claims. The need for solutions that improve the efficiency and ensure the accuracy of the complex process of handling insurance claims continues to grow. Central to Mitchell’s strategy has been to continuously expand the breadth and depth of our capabilities to meet these needs. Our business has grown steadily thanks to our commitment to be a leader in all markets we serve.

Mitchell is a place where people can make meaningful contributions and grow their careers. We are always looking for passionate, new teammates across many of our functions: technical teams to build products and support delivery to the customers, service and sales teams that focus on supporting customer success, nurses to care for injured workers and help them get back on their feet after a work injury, etc. Our corporate functions — IT, marketing, finance, and human resources — work diligently to support an environment where everyone at Mitchell can do their best work on behalf of our customers, our community and each other.

When providing solutions and innovation for auto repair, is the bigger issue dealing with fraud or dealing with the complexities that naturally come from such endeavors?

Without question, as it relates to auto repair, the bigger issue is the rising complexity of vehicle design and construction. A typical car coming off the production line today is significantly more sophisticated than cars manufactured even a decade ago. Any combination of materials advances (like high strength steel, aluminum and carbon fiber) and technology sophistication (like advanced driver assistance systems) have made it much more challenging to repair a vehicle today. Thus, in our collision business, our stated mantra — or what we refer to as our true north — is proper and safe repair.

Mitchell has a rich 73-year history in auto repair and we have been able to leverage that expertise to meet the changing needs of the market.

You are in such a tech-driven business, is it difficult to hire talent and hold onto it?

The market for talent is, without question, competitive, but Mitchell does important work and has a strong, diverse culture that sets us apart. We think of it as an “inside-out” approach — how we treat each other reflects how we treat our customers.

We focus on the value that each individual brings. It’s a place where people can have a voice, make an impact and do their best work. For employees just beginning their career, we have a robust campus recruiting and internship programs. For seasoned employees who are new to Mitchell, we do thorough onboarding to help them succeed. All our employees have both formal and informal opportunities to develop new skills, learn and grow. As a result, we have many long-standing employees here at Mitchell, people who have celebrated ten-, twenty- and even thirty-year service anniversaries.

When did the company enter Pharmacy Benefit Management Solutions?

Our entrance into the Pharmacy market a few years back is an example of how Mitchell has been able to identify other areas of the claims process where we believe we can improve outcomes and extend our impact into those areas. We are able to provide our clients better visibility into what prescriptions an injured party has received and that ultimately helps them get the injured party on the road to their pre-injury condition. So it’s a better outcome all the way around.

You mention “humane automation.” Can you tell us about that?

Like with many technology and tech-enabled companies, we are building greater amounts of automation into our solutions, including artificial intelligence-based technologies like computer vision, machine learning and big data-focused innovations. The intention is to drive a more efficient and effective process for our clients. When handling an insurance claim, our clients are guiding their insureds through what is generally a challenging experience. By automating certain tasks that claims professionals perform, we free up their ability to be more focused on the human interactions of the claims process — being more empathetic and/or being more available to guide their client through the process.

There is often fear that advances in automation will result in job loss, but there is also much opportunity for advances in technology to shift our human capital from rote tasks to tasks where being personal has much greater impact on a customer’s experience.

Is there something that would surprise us about Mitchell?

We’ve been in San Diego for so long that many people know our name, or perhaps they even know someone who works here, but they don’t necessarily know what we do. I think many people would be surprised to learn about the cutting-edge technology we develop and methodologies we use. On the software development front, we were early adopters of Agile and DevOps. Many of our solutions are cloud-based, and we’re using containers to bring enhancements to market faster and with a commitment to quality. Our solutions incorporate artificial intelligence technologies like computer vision and machine learning, and we partner with some of the biggest names in technology. We’ve come a long way from our roots in a garage in Clairemont Mesa, but we remain committed to the San Diego community.

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