Norwich Conserves BrainpowerNorwich Conserves Brainpower

Insurer automates processes that once required manual intervention, for big savings

information Staff, Contributor

January 9, 2003

3 Min Read
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In recent years, mergers and acquisitions have left Norwich Union Insurance with business processes -- such as compiling case information from disparate systems and reassigning cases -- that too often required manual intervention.

The Norwich, England, insurer wanted automated IT systems that "didn't waste brainpower," says Alex Robinson, the IT director at Norwich, a subsidiary of Aviva plc, in London. After a six-month pilot and another three months spent building a solid business case, the company is going live with software that will automatically set and track action dates, allocate and reassign cases, and poll other systems for task and case information, among other things. Now, Robinson says, "we're saving that brainpower for those things that require human intellect."

Norwich expects a big return from Tranzax, IT director Robinson says.

Norwich Union Insurance's problems really turned into headaches in early 2000 when its parent company, Norwich Union plc, merged with CGU plc to become Aviva, which now manages some $320.8 billion in assets. The largest insurance merger in the United Kingdom's history meant there were even more systems for Norwich Union Insurance to support. "We were running business processes that combined systems that were never designed to work together, and we had to use people to bridge those gaps," Robinson says.

In early 2001, Clear Technology Inc. showed its new product, Tranzax, to Norwich. The startup had developed software for the financial-services sector designed to help automate a consistent set of business rules within a process, regardless of the systems that support that process. By midyear, after months of working with Clear Technology to improve scalability, Robinson gave Tranzax a try.

To test the software, the IT team identified a single process, recovery, which involves reclaiming money from another insurance company in the event of an auto accident that's not the fault of Norwich's customer. The money was sometimes held up because of the multiple systems and automation gaps. "If you add up several hundred auto claims, that becomes several thousand pounds. If the money is outstanding for even a few days, the cost is quite substantial," Robinson says.

Tranzax helped Norwich identify and document the best steps to accomplish a recovery task in a workflow diagram. The steps, such as confirming that the party at fault is insured by someone other than Norwich, were then encoded so they could be automated, and links were built to the underlying systems. Finally, an interface was built for the claims handlers. Robinson wouldn't be specific, but he says that this let the insurer increase the number of claims it handles.

Most business processes at insurance companies tend to be very manual and inefficient, which can hurt customer-service levels, increase operational costs, and create inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the business, says Kimberly Harris, a Gartner research director. "Technologies like Tranzax focus on supporting these 'broken' business processes by combining workflow tools and process automation, including business-rules engines."

Norwich's successful pilot is now going into production, and Robinson and his team are starting a second implementation that involves claims handlers in different distribution channels. It will use a new version of Tranzax that lets customers build browser-based user interfaces. Robinson says the company expects to see a multimillion-pound return within three years.

Tranzax could give the insurer a greater ROI than any other software it has implemented in five years, Robinson says. "It's a way of doing what you already do with more automation, and that lets us get simple things right every single time."

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