Case Study for HyperAutomation and Robotics & Cognitive Automation (R & CA) In: Insurance Industry

CASE STUDIES IN INSURANCE INDUSTRY

HyperAutomation technology is seeing widespread adoption across industries, including financial services broadly. However, the insurance sector has been lagging behind banking and other financial services domains in its adoption. Insurers have just started to run pilot programs to explore the benefits that HyperAutomation can provide in automating repetitive processes. Those that have made inroads are already experiencing positive results. The benefits of R&CA, however, go far beyond just efficiency gains.

While HyperAutomation is expected to act as a first step in the adoption of automation, cognitive technologies are expected to increasingly drive automation for the sector in the not too distant future.


IMPACT OF HYPERAUTOMATION IN INSURANCE INDUSTRY

Impact to employment in the insurance industry over the next 10 years, automation is expected to displace 22.7 million existing jobs and create 13.6 million new jobs in the US economy, resulting in a net job loss of 9.1 million jobs (or 7 percent of jobs in the US). A significant portion of this impact would be felt across the insurance industry, given that 51 percent of financial jobs are projected to be transformed by automation by 2019.2 In most insurance firms, the current delivery pyramid is observed to be significantly bottom heavy with the majority of volume-heavy transactions and reporting processes (regulatory reporting, claims processing, document verification, etc.) being performed by humans. The advent of robotics will likely reshape this pyramid as insurers automate many of these transactions/ processes, potentially reducing the size and engagement of the bottom and middle layers of the delivery pyramid, while seeing a growth in the top layer.

CLIENT

Our Client being a leader in providing best in-class technology platforms and service solutions for the financial services industry.it has been in the life insurance and annuity BPM services since 1996.With deep experience in insurance industry, they have worked with life insurance companies, retirement companies across the globe, partnering with clients to help them stay ahead of the innovation curve.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

Around 900K policy requests were processed manually.

Requests for various financial and non-financial processes in the form of Scanned PDF were received by the agents.

After going through all that data, the agents needed to enter the same information onto various applications which would take a long period of time.

Another challenge being, the processes had 15-30% variations in functionality across clients, for which specific guidelines and procedures needs to be followed. That led to a further increase in the time and manual effort involved, the agents doing these processes experienced a high level of frustration due to the repetitive nature of their tasks and the need to replicate their efforts across multiple applications.

SOLUTIONS

After studying the client’s processes and analyzing each of their stages in detail to understand the suitability of using HyperAutomation so as to reduce the tedium and effort involved in dealing with the quantum of data. The ideal process candidates for HyperAutomation are deterministic or rule-based in nature. The Study revealed several such processes that could be successfully automated based on their volumes and average handling time, such as:

Changes in work flow & validation

Inserting & deleting data of customers for any policy which comes as a request to tool.

Traversing through various administrative applications to update data for the respective policies.

Identifying data types and systems of records impacted.

Identify unprocessed change requests in the inbound work queue.

Generating the required letters and notifications.

APPLICATION OF ROBOTS

Implementing a viable automation solution across the various insurance processes. The validation activities for each of the processes were embedded as business rules in the HyperAutomation bots. The bots performed the validation of each of these business rules across the multiple data points and the results were presented to the process agents to take actions upon.

Before automation, the operations agents used to review and manually enter the request information from a scanned PDF into the various admin applications. After the implementation the process is greatly simplified. Now, the agent only needs to enter the information to be updated in an excel template. The robot solution uses this template as an input to automatically traverse through and update the various

applications for the respective policies. The robotic process then automatically generates the letters to inform changes made as per their requests and saves these notification letters in specific folders. The only human role left after automation is for the human agent to review the summary log generated after the automated processes are complete, and close the ticket in the admin system.

HYPERAUTOMATION IN INSURANCE?

In insurance, HyperAutomation is defined as implementing software robots that can be custom configured for each computer, without the use of code. These software robots help their real-life knowledge-workers with the monotonous and repetitive chores in insurance work, such as data entry.

HyperAutomation effectively brings to insurance operations an AI (artificially intelligent) workforce, i.e., robotic assistants that are able to take over employee’s basic computer commands, handling a variety of “low-value-add” tasks that currently drain these worker’s time, energy, and morale.

Insurance robots operate similarly to Excel macros. But unlike Excel macros (which only work, obviously, in Excel), HyperAutomation bots can work across multiple systems, instead of being confined to just one. Thus, these robots can work at the individual-data-field level across all insurance systems.

Using HyperAutomation one can process actions right down to the mouse and keyboard levels, they can do everything from opening applications to clicking, copying, and pasting information from one application to another, sending emails, and similar activities.

For established insurance providers, operations have traditionally (and heavily) relied on outdated legacy systems (with intricate moving parts), that don’t communicate well with each other. This has resulted in the need for highly-paid knowledge workers to effectively provide the “bridge” between these disparate systems—in what amounts to grueling days spent transcribing and reconciling data: opening emails, copying and pasting information between legacy systems, generating PDFs, and so forth. Thus the “Tower of Babel” problem—the inability of the legacy systems to “talk to one another” without manual human intervention at the keystroke level—has created an impassably-high hurdle for streamlining existing technologies, without a wholesale (and costly) reinvention of the entire company’s IT infrastructure. So, it’s never happened.

For newer insurance providers, the bar is lower. They face fewer challenges, given their ability to leverage a largely cloud-based infrastructure from the get-go. Contrast their situation to that of well-established insurance providers, and you can see that it gets expensive to reinvent core systems that routinely fall short on the promise of automation.

This is precisely why insurance companies-perhaps especially the entrenched ones-are so excited about HyperAutomation. It finally lets them use robotics in the insurance industry to “connect the last mile” of their legacy insurance systems in a way that improves the customer experience and back-office efficiency. It’s little wonder that HyperAutomation is changing the way insurance companies conduct business operations.

Before automation, the operations agents used to review and manually enter the request information from a scanned PDF into the various admin applications. After the implementation the process is greatly simplified. Now, the agent only needs to enter the information to be updated in an excel template. The robot solution uses this template as an input to automatically traverse through and update the various

applications for the respective policies. The robotic process then automatically generates the letters to inform changes made as per their requests and saves these notification letters in specific folders. The only human role left after automation is for the human agent to review the summary log generated after the automated processes are complete, and close the ticket in the admin system.

WHAT ARE THE USES OF HYPERAUTOMATIONIN INSURANCE?

Common work tasks that can be automated via hyperautomation include:

log in, and toggle between different applications and systems.

Copy and paste data from spreadsheets to core systems.

Move data from core systems to spreadsheets.

Move information from Core System A to Core System B.

Pull data from invoices into a core system.

an email and move its data into a core system.

Move files and folders from desktops to servers.

Scrape information from the internet and websites.

Calculate data automatically to create reports.

SOME BENEFITS OF HYPERAUTOMATION IN THE INSURANCE INDUSTRY

Robots can help you link disparate legacy systems, on the front-end, with no coding, to conduct insurance operations faster, reduce labor costs, expedite new business onboarding, underwriting, customer service, and claims processes… all at the same time. With the shifting demographics of customers, customer interaction preferences are moving towards the digital and speed of transaction. Customers today expect consistent service levels and convenience while working with their insurance company – the same ease of service and cycle time that they might experience shopping online or while using online banking.

The only way your insurance company can tap the maximum benefits of HyperAutomation in an insurance use-case is by first standardizing as much of the manual work as possible. Deep, front-line process analysis and desk-level work standardization across the entire organization are, simply, essential for HyperAutomation. They’re what makes HyperAutomation in insurance worth the investment and the only way to build a business case with real return-on-investment.

As we’ve noted, the benefits from HyperAutomation in insurance can be both financial and operational in nature, improving back-office processes and the customer experience while saving money on labor. Basically, hyperAutomation lets you do a lot more with what you have, or less.

When compared to traditional automation, hyperautomation in insurance has specific benefits, including:

Faster claims processing- Claims processing requires employees to gather information from various documents and copy/move that information into various systems. It’s a time-consuming process, which delays the timely response that customers desire when they file a claim. HyperAutomation can move large amounts on claims data with one mouse click.

Easier policy cancellation- The process of cancelling policies is time-consuming due to having to interact with email, a policy administration system, a CRM, Excel, and PDFs. HyperAutomation can toggle through all of these interactions at the same time and eliminate the need to move data through all of them manually.

Simplified new business on-boarding- Sometimes companies grow faster than they can manage. Robots can abet growth with minimal growing pains: manual inter-departmental data movement from new clients being on-boarded can be reduced by at least 50% – within weeks.

Increased data accuracy-Using HyperAutomation increases the reliability of data. That’s because, unlike humans, robots are unable to key in data incorrectly; nor will their “minds” wander while performing repetitive tasks. But you must resolve bad data being received on the front end for it to work right.

Standardized processes- A side effect of using robots is the necessary standardization of processes. In order to start using a robot, a company’s process all need to be standardized, which in turn increases worker efficiency, and then greatly increases the speed at which the robots can do their work as well.

Legacy-systems compatibility and getting Implementation friendly new systems-Robots can be configured to use old systems that might be replaced in the next few years, and updated to work with the new ones. Robots are easily reconfigured within days to point to new systems as they get implemented.

Easy transition- Working at the familiar desktop level, robots are easy for employees to understand and to use. They can be installed quickly (unlike traditional IT projects), and work with existing technology.

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