The importance of Business Process Management(BPM) in Insurance

What is BPM

Business process management (BPM) is a function of operations management where a number of methods can be used to discover, model, analyze, measure, improve, optimize, and automate business processes. Any combination of methods used to manage a company’s business processes is BPM. It enables the rapid automation of a large number of different processes using specially designed IT applications.

In recent years, business process management (BPM) has emerged as a proven technology that helps insurers meet their business objectives of improving performance, increasing profitability, delivering superior customer service, increasing shareholder returns, and gaining a clear competitive advantage.

Why BPM is important for insurers

BPM has helped insurers release numerous benefits related to operational efficiency and business innovation. Here’s a look at how exactly BPM has helped:

Operational efficiency

• Enhance employee productivity — BPM can automate manual tasks and free up employees to focus on higher-value activities.
• Speed-up processes — BPM can enable faster decision-making and can improve the functioning of all business processes.
• Increase partner responsiveness — BPM tools can facilitate partners to get on board and respond faster.
• Better manage inventory — BPM can bring about significant improvements in processes that result in streamlining inventory management.

Business innovation

• Enhance product capabilities — Using BPM results in responsive product design and an enhanced capability to implement new products.
• Increase new business — BPM encourages innovative ways of approaching business problems and can help overcome challenging obstacles.
• Raise customer service levels -BPM facilitates faster and more agile responses to customer needs and queries and improves the quality of customer service.

The current process landscape in insurance

As insurers grew in scope and complexity over the years, many of them have seen their processes become fragmented across regions and product offerings. This has led to many disconnected systems often operating with complementary functionality within the business. This can lead to serious inefficiencies in monitoring and tracking. The following info-graphic analyses the characteristics of insurance processes to highlight the ones that are most suitable for the adoption of BPM.

The business and technology drivers in these areas which can be addressed by insurance are:

The insurance covers the range of products from auto, property, casualty, commercial, health, and life and is facilitated by different process implementations and application systems. It is important that insurers determine the specific management approach and the analytical toolsets of BPM that they would like to implement for the achievement of their business objectives. Once this determination is finalized, a range of BPM tools such as business process reengineering, process automation, workflow management, and business activity monitoring can be applied to suitable verticals.

Key benefits of BPM for insurance companies

The current legacy systems that most insurance companies use are often inefficient and inflexible and with their inherent difficulties in communicating between layers of system architecture that were patched on over the years, they are apt to cause more challenges than solutions. In an environment that is increasingly regulated by strict Government norms and regulations, a move to BPM holds many key benefits for insurers:

• Improve profitability & lower expense ratios

Process automation can lead to considerable cost savings as a result of a reduction in manual tasks, streamlining of processes resulting in elimination of redundant tasks and an overall improvement in functional efficiencies.

• Improve customer service and agent management

Independent agents and customers are easily configured to receive a timely and automated flow of data, information, notifications and alerts with the implementation of BPM. This ensures that the information provided by insurers is up-to-date, fast and with a minimum of lag time.

• Deliver superior underwriting results

With the deployment of BPM, a common underwriting process is easily standardised. Far better control and monitoring of the process is possible as each insurance division needs to access underwriting through the common process set in place. This allows underwriters to focus on the data driven information and knowledge-based functions of their roles and perform better.

• Increase productivity

BPM eliminates the need for repetitive tasks such as manual reconciliation, visual data verification and typing-based data entry and enables seamless integration of workflow tasks with back-end systems. It also improves the productivity of agents as process automation and integration gives them another reason to align with a carrier besides price or increased commissions.

• Create system and process flexibility and agility

BPM enables agility and flexibility in the operations of insurers and enables them to rapidly and efficiently respond to changes in business demand, new opportunities and emerging regulatory requirements.

• Create process transparency and integrity

By setting out to document and formalise all business tasks and rules, BPM is set up to reduce an insurers dependence on a few key employees. Policies and procedures can be enforced by making key business rules and decisions consistent and repetitive in all the business processes.

• Enable continuous process improvement

The implementation of BPM allows processes and rules to be standardised and optimised and this enables completely automated monitoring and escalations for deviations, bringing the process into sharp focus and thereby an improvement in customer engagement and a clear competitive advantage. This is not possible when processes are manual.

• Align IT execution with business strategy

BPM helps forge a strong partnership between business and IT. The defining of requirements and implementation of processes that are critical to business success can be achieved when business users, analysts and IT staff collaborate. IT is able to provide a more service oriented architecture (SOA) approach to business needs as deploying and changing processes rapidly is much easier with the implementation of BPM.

While each company’s processes and needs are different, BPM enables any organization to enhance its operational efficiencies on a continuous basis, thereby improving overall performance and providing a competitive advantage.

Leveraging on inherent technical experience and expertise along with a deep understanding of client requirements, the Neutrinos solution is a robust, high impact solution. We are experienced in digital transformation and integration of new-age technologies to help insurers achieve their growth objectives. Reach out to our experts for more details, today!

References:

https://www.infosys.com/industries/insurance/white-papers/Documents/BPM-path-profitability.pdf