Achieve operational excellence through automation: a step-by-step guide

Human resources are expensive and finite, and in a hard market, growth is essential to maintain profitability. The answer for many lies in automation.

Yet automation is largely applicable to simplistic processes that can be dealt with in bulk. This is not often compatible with commercial insurance. The answer lies not in attempting to automate the end-to-end processes, but to find smaller, incremental tasks that can be dealt with by robotic process automation (RPA), that can add up to a significant time and cost saving overall, and liberate employees to manage the high touch, complex customer care tasks.

In this presentation titled “Achieve operational excellence through automation: a step-by-step guide”, Jurgen Langner, senior sales director, insurance for Blue Prism, will tell Intelligent Insurer’s Commercial Lines Innovation Europe Virtual Event on October 11 how this can be done. He will be sharing insights into the automation process alongside Blue Prism client, Allianz, which can describe the last five years of RPA integrations and demonstrate the various ways it can be applied successfully to commercial policies.

Langner spoke to Intelligent Insurer ahead of the event.

Where should executives start when considering implementing automation?

I get a lot of questions from customers who say: “We see the potential of automation but where do we start?”

First, don’t start with the most complicated processes that occur to you. Start with the simplest, the ones that run most often where people are doing the same task repeatedly. There’s a huge benefit from taking repetitive work away from people so they can concentrate on real business challenges and finding creative solutions.

Who should be part of the decision-making process?

You need to have people on board who deal with it every day. Certainly, insurers have people whose job it is to design processes and they think that once they’ve created it, it follows a set pattern. That is often true, but when you sit at a computer with people who live that process, you’ll soon find that something happens that takes them in one direction, but something else will take them down a different path altogether.

What the designer thought was one process is, in fact, 10 different ones. If you have that knowledge, it’s easy to set up a properly automated process, where the people who know it intimately can then see the richness automation can deliver and understand what they’re likely to get out of it.

How do you triage the business for automation?

When you jump into these processes, there is a lot you can automate, but it doesn’t always make sense to automate everything. You must check your insurance target operating model and the areas that are crucial for insurance itself. Where people calculate the risk and coverage in policies needs some creativity, and those typically wouldn’t be processes that you automate.

One aspect of insurance is to streamline the daily business as much as possible, the other is to be more creative to develop market-leading products and deal with customers. They need to fit together to work.

Doesn’t this mean wider cultural as well as technological change?

Look at the target operating model and divide it into areas that will be automated versus not automated. Then, bring them together using RPA. This means you develop your target operating model into a robotic operating one. It evolves as a result.

This is the big challenge though—there are people, systems and strategy involved and it all needs to be tied up as one. During the presentation, our colleague from Allianz will reveal the company’s learnings from five years of RPA integrations.

Can you give some indications of the time or cost savings automation could deliver, even at a simplistic level?

Take life insurance as an example. A simple reactivation where the city of residence has changed would take one person around three minutes to open the policy, change it and file it again. But when you have one million customers, you can expect on average 200,000 reactivations like this every year. It can be done using automation in seconds. Equally, with a bot doing it there is no failure in a simple process like this, whereas with humans there is always room for error.

Are there wider implications for the health of individual carriers or the industry at large?

One of the sector’s big problems is that it has a problem attracting young, fresh talent. Companies are still growing strongly, but there’s not enough people. You need to find a way to balance the workload to make it feasible.

Where RPA has freed up time for humans to undertake more complex tasks, companies have been able to create more complex products, knowledge-built products that naturally have a higher value to customers and to the insurer.

In addition, there is potential to build a stronger market position through customer experience. Automation means the client isn’t waiting weeks to find out if the carrier will accept the risk and, in many cases, RPA can make sure simple claims are paid quickly, if not immediately. This is a huge benefit.

You don’t want to be sitting through a storm and waiting for your insurer to deal with your claim. When people need help, they need it immediately. Automation has plenty of positive effects.

Jurgen Langner, senior sales director, insurance at Blue Prism, will give a presentation titled “Achieve operational excellence through automation: a step-by-step guide”, at Intelligent Insurer’s Commercial Lines Innovation Europe Virtual Event on Monday, October 11. He will be sharing insights into the automation process alongside Blue Prism client, Allianz.

The event is free for insurers and brokers, register here: https://www.commercial-lines-innovation-europe.com/