Take COI Off Your Plate: A Live Look at the Prism x Jones Integration

Angela: Welcome to today’s webinar. I’m Angela deRocco, the Product and Customer Marketing Manager here at Building Engines. Today we’re really excited to walk you through the Prism and Jones integration and show you how, together, we’re automating the entire certificate of insurance lifecycle. Before we begin, I want to go over a few housekeeping items. If you have any questions, please enter them in the Q&A panel, since we’ve saved some time at the end for questions. We’ll also be sending out a recording of this session within the next few days, so please be on the lookout for it, and feel free to share it with anyone who wasn’t able to join or who might find it helpful. With that, I’ll hand it over to Ray and Justin.

Reynel: Thank you. Hello, everyone, I hope you’re all having a great day. Next slide, Angela, thank you. I want everyone to think about one property where every vendor, every tenant, and every contractor needs a certificate. Each certificate has several policies, and each policy has its own expiration date. Now think about that across your entire portfolio. Anyone who manages tenants and vendors knows this. First, there’s tracking and requesting certificates. Every vendor and every tenant owes a certificate, and chasing them 30, 60, 90 days before that coverage expires is a job in itself. Second comes reviewing the certificate. Someone has to check each certificate against the actual contract requirements. And then there’s visibility. Without a dedicated insurance person, it’s hard to see where you stand across the portfolio, whether there are any gaps, and whether you’re carrying any risk.

Reynel: For those who don’t know, let me introduce you to Prism. It’s a tenant experience platform that helps you manage tenant requests across your entire portfolio, with modules such as work orders, resource reservations, and visitors, and it helps you manage the building itself with things like inspections, preventive maintenance, contracts, and insurance, which is why we’re here today. Insurance gives you a solid foundation. Next slide. You start by creating a vendor or tenant profile with requirements for each vendor, or for all your vendors, by coverage type. This can include limits and A.M. Best ratings if required. When you create a certificate, you select a company or property and enter the coverage types and expiration dates, plus any requirements from that profile. Prism then checks the certificate against the profile you’ve created, and that’s how we determine compliance. I’m going to share my screen and give you a taste of what I just described.

Reynel: In insurance, you have the list of profiles you’ve created, either for all your tenants or all your vendors, or you can create one single profile that all of your vendors fall under. As you create a profile, you enter the profile name, let’s say High Risk. Then you select who the profile is for, so let’s say vendors. Next, you select the coverage types required, either for an individual vendor or for all your vendors. I’m going to pick general liability, and then enter the limit amount. I’ll just put some random numbers here. And if you want to get down to the nitty-gritty, you can even select the A.M. Best rating. You enter all the types of coverage that are required, and once the profile is filled out, you have the base foundation of what you need in Prism.

Reynel: Once you’ve created the profile, you go to Companies, find the company in your list, and open its settings, where you’ll see all the profiles you’ve created. Here’s the High Risk profile I created before we started, so I didn’t have to go through the entire process. I’ll select that profile and save it. From then on, any time I create a certificate for this company, Prism checks it against that profile.

Reynel: So how do you create a certificate? You visit the Certificates page, create the certificate, and enter the name you want to give it, either the vendor’s name or anything you’d like. Then I select the category, and Prism searches all the companies in your account that fall under that category, in this case vendors. I go through the company list and select the company I’m creating the certificate for. I can then add the COI and manually select all the properties this vendor has access to across the portfolio. After selecting the properties, I have the coverage types I selected, and I need to enter the values from the certificate the vendor gave you. As you can see, Prism is already starting the calculation that tells you whether this certificate is compliant with the profile you created. As I enter the dates from the COI, it runs the calculation.

Reynel: Once the certificate is complete, you land back on the certificates page, where this column tells you whether it’s compliant or non-compliant. If I open a certificate I created earlier that was marked non-compliant, I can scroll down and see all the properties linked to it, and every coverage with its coverage type, currency, and limit, along with the expiration dates and any notes you’ve added, such as the insurer’s name and A.M. Best rating. Let me open one that’s marked compliant so you can see what that looks like. Here it’s calculated against the profile and marked compliant, and it shows the result for every property the vendor is linked to and every coverage type. I’m now compliant, one for one, for this property, which is the property I set up on the profile at the start. Prism checks the COI the vendor sent you against all the requirements for that property and the profile.

Reynel: As you can see, this can be quite a lengthy process, but it works. And this is where the partnership with Jones can lift that pressure off you. I’m going to hand it over to Justin to show you the three steps where Jones can help.

Justin: Awesome, thanks a lot, Ray. Hey, everybody, it’s great to be here, and thanks so much for joining. I’ll share my screen and give you a sense of what this integration looks like. One of the nice things about Jones is that we specialize in insurance compliance verification. That’s really what we do, and it’s what we focus on. As Ray showed you, there are a lot of tools in Prism that give you control over your compliance process. There are a lot of ways to track certificates and get into policy details, but it is manual work. What Jones does is take that manual work off your plate. We do compliance reviews, and we do outreach to tenants and vendors to help them get compliant. What I want to show you in this demo is how some of that information comes into Prism automatically, and how you can initiate new requests starting in Prism.

Justin: Let’s imagine we’re in an account that has been integrated between Jones and Prism. The first thing I’ll show you is an example of a vendor doing work on multiple properties. If I go to my companies in Prism and click on an example company, like The Plumbing Corps, I can see at a glance, at the company level, what’s going on with this company on the Jones side. Now that this account has been integrated, I can see these insurance statuses. On one of my properties, Jones has already found them not compliant, and on a different property I’ve requested a COI, but we’re still awaiting a response. So there’s a process already in progress. That’s the overall company level, broken down per property.

Justin: Now, if I go back to companies and pull up a different vendor, let’s say an HVAC vendor we’ll call J and Sons, we have a status from Jones: Jones has found them not compliant on this one property. But what I’d like to do is initiate a new request. I could do that in Jones, but I’m already doing my work in Prism, and I’d like to stay in Prism. So I go to Manage Properties, where I can see the available properties I could add them to, and the insurance requirement sets that have been set up in your Jones account. This is a feed of your Jones insurance requirements. Let’s say I want to add them to 33 Arch St. I activate them, and then I make a selection. In this case, let’s say I have a requirement set called High Risk Vendor. The details would vary in your account, but for this example, I want them associated with High Risk Vendor. Then all I need to do is hit Save, and that does a couple of things at the same time. You can see the status updated, so we now have a new status in Prism for this vendor. Behind the scenes, this record is sent over to the Jones account, where J and Sons is created as a new record on the 33 Arch St. property in Jones. At the same time, an email is triggered to the vendor, basically saying, give us your COI. Once Jones reviews that COI and completes the audit, we generate a new status of compliant or not compliant, and it syncs back here automatically, so you can see the result once the Jones review is complete.

Justin: We also give you options for viewing more insurance details. Ray just walked you through how certificates work in Prism, so I’ll go over to that section. As some of you may know, you can see a policy-by-policy breakdown on this screen. Rather than asking you to fill out that information manually, going grid by grid, our review calculates it for you and sends the information over in the Prism format. Here’s an example from The Plumbing Corps. You can see we have an insurance report from Jones, and the actual certificate file that was uploaded to Jones, the PDF of the COI that was audited, is available. There’s a link to click if you want more information about the certificate. You can see the properties they’re associated with, and going coverage type by coverage type, the information is already filled out. You don’t need to do it manually. In this example, for workers’ compensation, you get the policy number from Jones and some notes. This particular policy was compliant, and you get notes on the requirements for each component. Some of them are $500,000, some are $1,000,000, and so on. The general liability policy is the same: it was compliant, and you can see the limits Jones checked and the policy number. So if you want to get into the weeds on insurance compliance, you can get those details from Jones in your Prism account, and you also have the overall compliance status if you’re just looking for a summary.

Justin: Ultimately, what all of that leads to is more visibility, especially when you’re creating work orders. If you want to bring a vendor on site, for example, you might create a new work order, and when it comes time to assign it to a particular company, this integration lets you see the compliance status from Jones. So if I’m making a new work order to bring somebody on site and I see that The Plumbing Corps is actually not compliant, I might want to have a conversation with them, or do some outreach to them through Jones. Whoever you’re bringing on site, and whoever you’re thinking about paying, you can make a more informed risk decision based on the integration. I think that’s a pretty good summary of what we do. Thank you very much.

Angela: Great, thanks so much. I’ll take the screen back one last time, and we can jump into Q&A. Just a reminder that the Q&A panel is open, so please enter your questions and we’ll sift through them as they come in.

Reynel: Hey Justin, out of curiosity, how long does that information take to update? As you showed in the demo, you went to the company in Prism, went to the property, selected Manage, and sent the request over to Jones. Roughly how long does it take to sync?

Justin: Great question. The integration runs on a sync cycle every 30 minutes, in both directions. Depending on when you actually click the button, the longest it would take to arrive in Jones is 30 minutes, and it could be much shorter, because it’s a regular schedule. The same is true in the other direction for compliance reviews. When Jones gets new information, audits are completed, and a compliant or not compliant status is generated, those sync back to Prism every 30 minutes as well.

Angela: Perfect. I see a question here from Melissa, so I’ll read it now: will vendors get automatic emails asking them to renew their COI if it’s expiring? And if so, is it a seamless experience that gets adjusted automatically?

Justin: That’s a great question. On the Jones side, we do manage emails, and there are options in your account for whether you’d like to request renewals automatically or not. That’s a discussion for implementing with Jones. We have some customers who prefer it and some who don’t. But yes, if you’d like a renewal cadence, where Jones gets in touch a certain number of days before the expiration and starts asking for the renewal, we do offer that.

Reynel: On the Prism side, you can also select the vendor and send that email manually. So even if Jones already sent the email, if you want to trigger one from Prism as well, you can do that too.

Angela: Great. Here’s a question: with the integration, would we still need to maintain the Jones app?

Justin: The short answer is yes. You would have a Jones account and a full implementation of Jones, where we learn your insurance requirements and do the review for you. So you would still have a login, and you could still have different permission levels within your account for who views it. But what we’re trying to accomplish with the integration is that if you want to do most of your work in Prism, you don’t need to click over to Jones to see compliance statuses, launch a new request, or set up a work order. You can if you want, and of course all of the functionality is available in Jones if people need or prefer it.

Reynel: One of the key things to add to what Justin said: you can look at Prism as the one stop where you manage your business tasks, like contracts, as you add new vendors or tenants to the properties in your portfolio. You can stay in Prism and integrate with Jones to get all that information about your tenants or vendors directly from Jones into Prism.

Angela: I think that relates to this next question, in the same vein: does this work the same way for tenants?

Justin: Yes, it does, and there’s an additional nuance with tenants. It’s very similar, but in many cases, insurance requirements are negotiated in each lease, so they aren’t standardized. In my demo, I clicked a standardized requirement set called High Risk Vendor. In many cases, not always, that logic doesn’t really apply to tenants. So Jones does lease extractions, where we build custom requirement sets that apply to tenants, review their certificates, and send the resulting status back to Prism. Sometimes the mechanics are a little different, but it’s the same basic concept.

Angela: Perfect. Another question here from Brittany: I’ve had a few COIs come in without an email contact, with a phone number instead. Is that managed as well?

Justin: Great question. On the Jones side, the core product is email-based for notifications and requests. That’s the bread and butter of what we do. However, as an add-on for certain accounts, we do offer phone support. So it would depend on your needs, and it would be a conversation.

Angela: Another question here: for teams who are just getting started, what does the typical setup process look like? Do property teams need to upload existing requirements first, or does Jones handle that? Ray, were you going to say something?

Reynel: I was going to mention that, for getting started, if you don’t have a Prism account yet, you first need to set up with Prism, where you onboard all of your tenants or vendors and your properties. After that, you do your Jones integration, where Jones reviews all the certificates, and the contracts if it’s for tenants. That information then syncs over from Jones to Prism. Justin, anything you want to add?

Justin: Yeah. It is necessary to have both a Jones account and a Prism account for this to work. If you’re new to Prism and onboarding with Prism, there are some elements that overlap with Jones, so behind the scenes we try to coordinate our teams to make it as easy as possible and reduce any duplicate work. But yes, there would be an onboarding process for both Jones and Prism. The Jones one focuses on your requirements and making sure we understand exactly what you’re asking for and exactly what you need per property and per tenant. We try to get granular in that way. And Prism has a broader focus on property management in general.

Angela: This question: what happens if a vendor submits a certificate that doesn’t meet our specific lease requirements? Who catches that?

Justin: Great question. On the Jones side, we would flag that as not compliant. We review very carefully based on your requirements. We do a two-step review, so there’s always a human in the loop. We use some AI to augment the human review, but every cert gets looked at by an expert human, and the status would update in Jones to not compliant. That then feeds into Prism. Jones also offers some automatic features, so if you’d like us to instantly notify a tenant or a vendor of non-compliance, we can do that. You don’t have to, if you want to review the deficiencies yourself. Then, on the Prism side, you would see that same status, and it would show up in the work order area if it applies to a vendor, so you could take action based on it.

Angela: Great, thanks, everyone, for all the questions. Again, if there’s anything else, please feel free to reach out to us. I’ll take the screen one last time to share some additional resources. We have this integration data sheet available: you can grab it by scanning the QR code on the screen, and I’ve also shared the link. Again, if you have questions, please feel free to reach out. I did see one last question come through about pricing. You can scan the QR code to request a demo, and we’ll get you in touch with someone from our team to go over pricing and whatever fits your needs. With that, we’ll wrap up. Thank you, everyone, for joining and for taking the time, and thanks to Ray and Justin for giving everyone this great overview of the Prism and Jones integration. Please look out for an email from me with the recording of the session and the data sheet, in case you missed that slide. Everyone who joined will receive it within the next few days. I hope everyone has a great rest of the day, and we’ll see you next time.

Justin: Awesome. Thanks, everybody.