“Be able to fail. Get good at failing, but fail fast.”
Tammy Muckerheide
Vice president of commercial underwriting
West Bend Mutual Insurance Co.
thesilverlining.com
Industry: Property and casualty insurance
Employees: More than 1,500
“If you’re not willing to challenge the status quo, organizations and individuals don’t evolve within an industry. It’s important to challenge established processes and procedures.
“That can be hard for people because it’s not always easy to accept change, and you can find a lot of things wrong with the innovation that you’re trying to implement. But it’s important to keep throwing out new ideas, identifying what works, what doesn’t and what shows promise.
“What I’ve learned in my career – and this is something my boss taught me – is that we have to be able to fail and get good at failing, but fail fast.”
Professional experience: Muckerheide has worked for West Bend Mutual for 37 years. She started working there in high school as part of a co-op program before she was hired full time upon graduating high school and has excelled within the company ever since. She’s worked in records, data entry, rating and underwriting. She became a manager in 2012, a director in 2019 and was promoted to her current officer/vice president position in 2020.
Muckerheide is overseeing the implementation of new technology that leverages big data to speed up the underwriting process for small commercial insurance plans. West Bend Mutual has developed its own system that it says cuts the underwriting process down to 15 minutes. It’s a process that previously could take several days to get an insurance application to the underwriter. In the past, there were thousands of small commercial plans the company says it was unable to quote simply because of the volume and long turnaround time. Now that number is in the hundreds, resulting in millions of dollars more of direct written premiums being quoted, according to the company.
