BPM for insurance: four paths to outdistance competition

Business process management (BPM) software is a transformative technology that is helping insurance companies worldwide to rapidly address some of the industry's biggest historic challenges.

One of the best things about BPM is that the technology can be applied broadly, allowing an insurance company to gain multiple economies of scale.

Based on a white paper, recently released by Appian BPM, Vanessa Miller, Managing Director of VM Consulting, the master distributor for Appian in South Africa and Africa, shares: “The broad application of BPM in a business brings substantial benefit, but it also presents those who want to introduce BPM to their organisations with a challenge - where to start?”

Miller adds: “Appian has identified four paths for deploying BPM in ways that help insurance organisations gain competitive advantage in relatively short periods of time.” Those paths are:

* Rebuilding the customer experience
* Addressing unmet customer needs
* Making independent agents love you
* Filling “white spaces” between current applications

Leading insurers are redefining their customer experience with Appian, requiring only a fraction of the cost and time of a “rip and replace” approach. Appian allows them to model desired cross-functional processes spanning departmental boundaries, and have them quickly converted into functional applications.

This allows them to consolidate existing systems and quickly gain competitive advantage. It produces more revenue and profit in the near-term, which they can use to reinvest in renovating core systems on their own schedule, with minimal impact to customers. This approach keeps costs low, allows the highest return areas to be targeted first, and shortens the time to seeing benefits, all important components in delivering fast ROI.

Territory Insurance Office in Darwin, Australia took this approach in transforming its customer-facing claims processes. With only a small IT team to service the entire business, and numerous legacy back-end systems involved, Appian BPM Suite provided the fastest way to streamline the process and overhaul the end-experience both for internal employees and customers. The project was delivered on time, on budget, and saw a multimillion-dollar return in the first 12 months.

Miller added: “Appian has proven to be the accelerant behind insurance companies who are succeeding, allowing them to rapidly refine their processes and interfaces to identify, attract, and retain only the best risks. These companies are leveraging the best features of the most modern BPM platforms - a fully integrated set of capabilities (no 'stack'), mobile BPM applications without extra development, built-in social communication, and migration from the cloud to on-premise without any changes. Their success with Appian is fuelling the best positive cycle where they can keep prices low and profit high, and we at VM Consulting are excited to be part of this revolution.”