Business Process Automation
The Problem: Less Like Architecture, More Like Archaeology
Most insurers have built up processes over the years that aren’t written down anywhere or evaluated on a regular basis — they’re followed strictly from memory. These processes don’t evolve over time, because nobody stops to say “wait, why are we doing it this way?” So as software, regulations, and the business itself change, the processes become increasingly out-of-date and inefficient. If anyone wants to change anything, they have to go digging into institutional memory to figure out what the process was meant to do in the first place.
The process that our client was struggling with was the quote-bind-issue flow — the series of steps between offering a quote to a client, and actually issuing the policy.
The Analysis: Keep It Simple(r)
Our client clearly needed to overhaul their out-of-date, inefficient processes. But they couldn’t afford a change if it meant interrupting business and losing older information. Current process management philosophy states that processes should evolve every time they’re used, as employees take note of how the processes do and don’t work in their changing business environment. This evolution should occur seamlessly. Of course, for that to work, there has to be someone working with the organization who knows all the processes from top to bottom.
We learned that one problem with the client’s quote-bind-issue flow was that different teams were working on different parts of the same process. Agents, risk escalation managers, and underwriters were all working on the same projects, but often they were following different processes, meaning that they were duplicating or even undoing each other’s work.
The Solution: Digging Out — For Good!
We used our process management expertise, as well as our client’s own information resources, to learn the history of the existing processes. Then we diagrammed the process flow to understand how best to streamline the processes and integrate them together, so that everything could work smoothly together without interference. Once we’d learned the processes, we helped the client to learn them, too, and established a technology partnership to make sure that they continued to evolve with the times. Making disparate processes work together means that everything moves faster.
The best part, of course, is that continuous evolution means that the client never had to stop and upgrade their processes again.