(Image credit: Gerd Altmann.)
Traditionally, the biggest challenge insurance providers face for process improvement, risk assessments, and automation is the significant cost, time, and questionable accuracy associated with evaluating the “as-is” state of process execution. Perhaps even more impactful, is the ability to measure and sustain hard-fought for improvements over the long haul, meaning how do we make sure changes and enhancements are being followed long after the auditors, consultants, and white shirts leave? To manage the future of insurance processing and regulatory risks, carriers must be able to better understand and manage their business processes, which simply isn’t possible with traditional methods. Determining where and how to employ an improvement strategy can be complex, but it doesn’t have to be.
Just because “this is the way we’ve always done it” doesn’t mean it is the right way and doesn’t necessarily make it the best option either. Often, insurance leaders will overlook process bottlenecks because of their lack of visibility and inability to understand the impact of a specific task in the process. Insurers need to motivate their highly skilled experts to adopt process intelligence solutions that can deliver insight and understanding out of the box. If leaders commit to use them with creativity, confidence and consistency, they will see a drastic change in the way employees visualize, understand, improve and monitor insurance operations.
Why Process Intelligence? And why now?
Continuous competition, an ever-changing regulatory environment, and major cost pressures have driven a frenzy of performance improvement initiatives. This is reflected in the current explosion of new technology-based solutions for insurance claims, risk remediation, and customer centric process management.
Insurers are facing increasing pressure from customers to provide quality customer service, efficient processing, and are constantly demanding more of their internal teams, when they are already working with less. Adding to this pressure, rules and regulations from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners continue to force companies to maintain increasingly strict obligations with compliance and audit procedures.
Through all of this, employees are faced with a myriad of processes occurring for different types of claims along with dozens of sources to collect and route their information from. When these processes are not fully understood it spells trouble for a company. With the insurance sector growing and competition becoming tighter, it is becoming vital that companies can analyze their processes and find opportunities to improve efficiency while decreasing costs, all while maintaining compliance obligations.
Still Missing the Mark?
The intense drive to digital transformation is also driving the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation (RPA) in the insurance industry. Additionally, evolving compliance and risk assessment is challenging traditional approaches to process improvement initiatives. The reliance on highly manual, sampling-based process discovery, as well as mapping and process analysis, is both costly and painfully slow. From an operational perspective, insurers rarely employ a 100 percent files review policy due to the manpower required using current manual methods. These traditional methods simply can’t keep pace with the rapid-fire changes and demands imposed by this digital shift.
While of course, many insurers are investing in digital capabilities, most are not yet fully realizing its customer or economic value. In many cases, individual transformation initiatives are just that—siloed efforts that fail to synchronize broader pan-operational aspects of process improvement. Responding to constantly evolving customer expectations, building backend processes to support platform scalability, and managing risk and compliance initiatives all stand to benefit from a holistic, data-driven approach to process transformation.
It seems obvious that aggregating end-to-end process data, analyzing it, and delivering useful, actionable process insight to relevant stakeholders has proven to be a substantial challenge for most organizations. Why is this so difficult?
One big reason is that many IT applications operate as disconnected “islands of information,” with minimal integration or even synchronization. This makes it challenging, if not impossible to cost effectively combine all relevant process data into a single, usable view of process execution.
But we can now use data exported by any system to aggregate and re-constitute processes in a data-driven, virtual model that reflects 100 percent of how processes are operating ‘as-is’. This is called a Process Digital Twin.
The Growing Digital Twin Trend
Process intelligence solutions produce a detailed digital twin powered by AI to make it easier to analyze and automatically monitor real-time process flows from any business operation, regardless of how ad-hoc or complex the process. They also include advanced business intelligence-style analytics that expose the true depth and breadth of process risks, compliance issues, and improvement opportunities.
Expose Risks & Target Opportunities Faster with Your Very Own Digital Twin
Process intelligence is being used to automatically discover, map, analyze, and even monitor and predict process flows and execution. Awareness of this technology is rapidly growing — as evidenced by adoption across a cross-industry spectrum of major firms. Insurance use cases have focused on customer journey, underwriting proficiency and improvement, claims throughput, regulatory compliance, cost reduction, revenue optimization, and even risk management.
Beyond Process Discovery and Analysis
With compliance rapidly changing and processes continuously changing, it’s important that insurers have one source of the truth where they can see where their processes are and where they are going. Process intelligence is equipped with monitoring and alerting capabilities that are especially beneficial when regulations change. By setting up a simple query and pairing it with a text or email alert you never need to spend time double checking or waiting to fix a mistake months later.
Process Intelligence helps to understand how to improve the customer experience and throughput, avoid compliance risks, and identify a wide variety of efficiency improvement opportunities quickly and at a fraction of the cost you pay today. It is time to get an inside view into the inner workings of end-to-end operational processes for any insurance unit.
Are you ready?
Are you ready to make more intelligence business decision for your organization? Move from, “we have a lot of data but we make a lot of best guesses and assumptions about our processes,” to “we make business decisions from in-depth insight into our processes; we know we make good choices because we do so based on facts from our data.”
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