Transforming Disability Insurance Services: How Lotus Labs Revamped DIS with a Cutting-Edge Internal Tool
In the world of high-income professionals, especially doctors, disability insurance plays a crucial role in safeguarding financial stability. Disability Insurance Services (DIS), a leading broker in this space, has long been dedicated to offering tailored insurance products that protect individuals from income loss due to disability. However, the internal tool that powered their business, a standard website-integrated platform known as the DMS, was no longer keeping pace with the company's needs. That's where Lotus Labs stepped in, taking on the challenge of modernizing and enhancing the DMS system.
The Challenge: Outdated Infrastructure and Performance Bottlenecks
When Lotus Labs first reviewed DMS, it became clear that DIS's technology infrastructure urgently needed modernization. The previous consultant teams had been unresponsive, leaving the platform not up to the mark. The front end, built using outdated React libraries, was sluggish, and many critical packages had either been deprecated or removed entirely. For developers tasked with updating and/or fixing some of its features, being so out of date made it difficult to run on a modern developer environment, causing significant delays in generating insurance proposals and comparison documents, a core function of the system that DIS relied on to deliver value to its clients.
They had a "reindex" button to execute in times of an emergency that would regenerate the database table indexes, as a band-aid to the performance issues. This was also run multiple times during the day automatically. We thought this was unacceptable and we only stopped when we removed that button and made the whole reindex operation redundant by improving the performance at all times.
Meanwhile, the back-end performance issues were creating other problems for DIS. The system would often hang, and navigating between screens was slow due to poorly optimized database queries. Generating proposal lists could take up to 2 to 3 minutes, seriously hampering productivity.
Lotus Labs conducted a workshop with the folks in DIS to come up with a comprehensive plan with detailed timeline.The project is divided into eight phases with specific objectives. Phase 1 focuses on reducing technical debt by updating dependencies, improving code, and setting up the development environment. Phase 2 adds functionality to parse spreadsheets and handle email campaigns. Phase 3 addresses optimizations and longstanding system issues such as fixing slowness and improving navigation. Phases 4 and 5 focus on marketing and underwriting with CRM integration and email enhancements. Phase 6 involves building a Data Lake for AI solutions, while Phase 7 improves accounting processes and data extraction. The final phase develops an executive dashboard for performance reporting
The Solution: Modernization from Front to Back
Lotus Labs took a comprehensive approach to solving DIS's problems. We began by updating all of the outdated React libraries that powered the front end of the DMS platform. This brought the system up to date and significantly improved its speed and usability. The modernization process was challenging—many components of the application were no longer compatible with modern systems, requiring extensive troubleshooting and re-engineering. However, our team revitalized the front end, creating a faster and more responsive platform than ever before.
On the back end, we tackled the performance issues head-on. One of our first steps was optimizing the database queries and adding indexes to key tables. This reduced the time it took to generate proposal lists from a frustrating 161 seconds to just 0.7 seconds—an improvement of over 99%. Another query that originally took 140 seconds was reduced to just 2 seconds after optimization. These changes made the DMS platform dramatically more efficient, allowing DIS brokers to focus on their work instead of waiting for screens to load.
New Features to Elevate DIS's Capabilities
Once the foundational performance issues were resolved, Lotus Labs added new features to further enhance the DMS platform. One of the standout features was an automated email and SMS campaign management tool, designed to increase customer engagement during critical periods—such as policy renewal. This tool allows brokers to schedule and send multiple follow-up messages over several days, encouraging clients to renew or extend their coverage. To ensure the effectiveness of these campaigns, we also introduced analytics tools that provide insights into delivery status and campaign performance.Now the process of creating a new campaign is smooth , the UI is intuitive
and the users have a superior vantage point of the overall communication with the customers.
Another key addition was the ability to generate and download proposal PDFs easily. This feature was designed to streamline the proposal creation process, allowing brokers to quickly assemble and share proposals with clients. Additionally, we implemented a secure and smooth login process, along with special administrative features for database management, making the platform easier to use and more secure.
Results: A Platform Built for the Future
The transformation of the DIS DMS platform has delivered remarkable results. In addition to drastically reducing query times and improving system stability, the new features we introduced have empowered DIS brokers to provide a better service to their clients. The platform is now fast, secure, and packed with useful tools that enhance productivity and customer engagement.
Lotus Labs is proud to have partnered with Disability Insurance Services in this project, enabling them to continue serving their clients with the high level of excellence they are known for. With their newly optimized and feature-rich internal tool, DIS is well-positioned to thrive in the competitive world of insurance brokerage.
Key Metrics of Success:
- Front End tech stack modernization
- Database profiling and optimizationsome text
- Proposal list query time reduced from 161 seconds to 0.7 seconds
- Another query optimized from 140 seconds to 2 seconds
- CI/CD for the the multiple development, qa and production environments
- New features like automated email campaigns, secure login, and PDF proposal generation
Lotus Labs has effectively positioned DIS for future growth, equipping them with the technology needed to meet the demands of high-earning professionals seeking comprehensive disability insurance coverage.
Upcoming work for future includes and is not limited to the following:
- Data Lakes for effective data storage and real time analysis and machine learning applications
- Integrating new use cases with additional departments like finance,accounting, HR etc.