Simple, Fast, Accurate - Why Wouldn’t You Automate?

By Mike Fieseler

Like any other business, insurance entities improve operations, efficiency and profitability by reducing costs, improving quality of their offerings, achieving higher speed to market and finding ever better ways to attract and keep customers.

Those of you who have read my previous articles probably will not be surprised to hear that I advocate workflow automation to realize all these benefits and advantages. Automation methods and tools are available to simplify and speed up every step of the policy lifecycle. Some of the most time-consuming tasks are routinely done by hand, when they can and should be performed by computing power.

At the start of the cycle, for instance, processing applications by potential policyholders eats up a lot of the company’s productivity bandwidth when handled manually. If you have people deciphering entries as soon as applications come in and transcribing them into a system, you are sacrificing hours of time and likely suffering through a great deal of human error.

The straight-through processing method removes the messy human element from this starting point. Instead of many hands having to touch the material along the way, the data pretty much just goes straight through the application system and comes out the other side in an actionable format for underwriters or other reviewers and decision makers.

Straight-through processing is noted for its capabilities of simple, fast, complete data gathering, input and validation. Straight-through processing and similar automation tools can quickly and accurately take care of much of the ponderous, timehungry pre-policy needs:

• Gather data • Validate and qualify data • Pre-populate data fields • Enter data into systems • Do quality check reports

To expand on a couple of these points, an automated process can scan incoming entries and conduct an OCR-style data extraction of the text. There are products out right now that perform with admirably high (98-99%) accuracy rates.

They leave only the messiest chickenscratch scribbling for some eagleeyed team member to figure out! By the way, that individual will also be automatically notified when there is a field to review. Changing to this way

See Why Wouldn’t You Automate? Pg 38

About the author, Mike Fieseler: Mike’s focus is on helping clients achieve operational efficiencies and cost savings. His career has spanned IBM, ARC, DataTrak, and for the past 10 years EOX Vantage. Last year he achieved the CPL - Certified Program Leader designation through Target University of the Target Markets Program Administrators Association (TMPAA).