Insurance companies are operating under tougher
than ever conditions.
To stay competitive, they have to gain cost saving
efficiencies in their operations, and free up talent
to create new offerings that drive growth.
Process automation can help them meet both imperatives.
But for many insurers, automation projects take too long,
cost too much, and don't deliver the hoped for value.
Generali Italia, a leading insurance provider,
beat these odds,
and achieved impressive results.
How?
It took a smart approach to process automation
by combining people, technology, and process redesign in
ways that brought out the best of each.
-: We launched our smart automation program back in 2018.
That was in the context of our strategy.
We actually have the mission to become the lifetime partner
of our customers and our distributors.
And we recognized that automation was one of the key levers
for some of the objectives that we have, including
improving service level in a radical way,
and also freeing up time of our resources
to support the delivery of new services and in general
to focus on more value adding activities.
-: What I believe was unique about this project
was the capability building dimension.
We assembled a central team
with all the necessary capabilities
in terms of business knowledge, processes,
data scientist, and technology.
And this team was supported by all the key stakeholders
in the organization.
In addition to that, it was created a center of excellence
to accumulate the knowledge and the experience and then
redeploy it to other dimensions of the organization
after the project.
And also the project management office supported
the execution of all the planned activities.
-: We took a smart approach to select
the processes that we wanted to automate.
On one end was the impact to customers,
and the other the feasibility.
We selected more than 40 processes, potentially
for automation, from claims handling in health,
to document management in P&C, to call center operations.
At the end of the month two, we had two pilots in production
and the impact was very impressive.
-: I believe the most important step here was to understand
that automation is not just technology, it's much much more.
Automation is pulling together
a set of ingredients beyond technology.
For example, is understanding of the business requirements
is mapping of the business process.
Is understanding which are the constraints
in the data privacy.
Is understanding how people feel the process,
and use the process.
Generally, what we have done was to select a subset
of processes, look into them, redesign the process
to a target state.
And only when the target state was very clear,
we eventually applied technology in order to get there.
And on top of that, we applied technology
only when strictly necessary.
-: After one year, we have more than ten processes
automated in production.
We are talking about processes, which are core
to the company with very high volumes, like for example,
the health claims handling which is running more than
200,000 transactions per year.
And in those processes, we have achieved significant
improvement both in terms of service level and
cases turnaround times have moved from seven days to one,
and in terms of efficiencies that we have gained.