December 2005 | Jose Leon

Automation

Automation is the type of business process automation where the highest ROI
can be reach in the implementation of a
workflow or BPM solution. Converting processes in the organization that a
lot of human intervention is needed to electronic matters in an automated way,
lots of improvement can be achieve. the majority of those interventions can be
diminished and transform to an automated way of responding or even letting the
process makes their own decisions thus increasing productivity for the humans.

And we haven’t considered yet the integration with others applications. If
you are only automating a simple process (for example expense reimbursement or
absence request) productivity is increased, but if you are integrating this
information with other systems in the execution of the same process, event more
productivity can be achieved and more costs can be reduced. That’s why
automation provides high ROI.

Calculating the return of investment is very easy. Can measure the amount of
time taken to execute the process and the amount of time after implementing the
solution. Also you determine how many more requests you are able to handle after
the implementation. One thing to notice also, is that in this kind of
automation, the benefits and the increase performance can be appreciated after
deployment making the investment in the solution an immediate success.

Business Process Management for Insurance

The insurance industry is one of greatest beneficiaries of BPM solutions. Automating business workflow in the organization, has shown to produce huge performance increases in productivity and reduce costs in areas like claims processing.

Analysis has shown that performance increases are around the 40% and 50% and that abandon call rates in call centers went down and service levels went up. I think this is because an organization, like one in the insurance industry, has a lot of processes that need to be executed and doing them manually always results in errors and slow response time, all of which are not good to the eyes of the customers. Automating these process leads the way to letting employees in the organization to focus on how to do their tasks in a much better way, how to please the customer and stop thinking about what the next task in the process is or whether or not I have made the necessary tasks for internal policy compliance.

And not only the insurance industry can benefit from automating business processes. They also perceive a huge benefit in areas like compliance. Insurance companies are required to comply with section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. One way to enforce these procedures is to use a BPM solution that assign the necessary tasks internally to persons that need to audit the information. All this information is recorded in the system for future references and clearly reduce the burden of knowing every procedure and we are sure the anything that has to be audited, has been audited.

Also, areas regarding the Anti-Fraud and Anti-Money Laundering initiatives can benefits from these kind of solutions enforcing policy controls in the process that assures that every customer is checked, tracked and investigated to prevent frauds in the organization. In the case of money laundering, policies can also be enacted in the processes to check for activity of terrorism or drug-dealing, triggering alerts and notifications to managers or responsible persons about the risks.

In general, BPM solutions provides great benefits to an insurance organization leading to increase performance and reduce costs in the execution of their processes.

UPDATE: See a life insurance request automated here.

Management

One of the primary benefits on implementing a BPM (Business Process Management) solution, is the information organization management receive.

Before, knowing the actual performance of business processes, resource usage and key indicators was difficult because there was no automated way of gathering this information. Now with these solutions, management can have an overlook of how the processes on his charge are doing, how resources distributes along the way and also, how activities are being completed, the time that is taking and which are the most efficient in certain tasks.

For example, the manager on an accounts payable department. He is in charge of the process for expense reimbursement and approval. Right now, employees from around the organization fills out a paper form detailing their expenses and sends them for approval to their managers and ends up in the accounts payable department. At this moment, the manager of A/P doesn’t know about the request, or when it is coming. It’s almost impossible to him to plan for the week. Also, when the request arrives, does he know who of his staff has the request? How much time did the person spent on the request? To whom should he assign the next request? What about statistics about the requests?

All this kind of questions can be answered when we implement and automate a business process. The expense request becomes electronic, and all the steps, integration activities and assignments become part of the automated process. The organization is becoming more, the electronic enterprise. Management will have all their questions answered and proper decisions can be made in the future.

Procx Tip #5 – Organizational Charts

When working with general users in the enterprise, we always need to understand how they relate to each other. Thinking about a person as an entity can bring us a lot of trouble when we are trying to model a process for the organization.

Users don’t do tasks for themselves, they always need information (either from the customer or from colleagues) so they are always in constant contact with other employees in the company and with their direct superior. This last person act as facilitator in process execution.

So, what’s the best way we can use to model users in the organization? The most common way to do it: Organizational Charts. They give us an easy way to create roles, create hierocracies of roles, define departments and assign final users of these roles and the levels they belong to. Levels give us another easy way to handle hierocracy in the company. In this case, the organizational chart has the intelligence to know who are the managers or directors of a certain department.

When building a process, assigning roles to execute the activities is as simple as selecting them from the organizationa, chart. At the time of execution, though, is where the magic comes in. when you assign for example, a direct role to an activity, Procx will go and get the actual user from the organizational chart. But, we can also assign an activity to a manager, and depending on who started the process, Procx can know automatically who’s department manager to sent the request.

This kind of modeling give us full power when working with processes and activities through the organization and let us view it as a whole.