PEX Week Awards Finalist: Generali

The annual PEX Awards are just a few short weeks away, and with the finalists having been recently announced, we thought that now would be the perfect opportunity to highlight some of the projects that made it through to the final judging round!

The Awards, which take place at PEX Week Orlando in January, highlight some of the most ambitious, inventive and successful Process Excellence projects of the year. It’s our opportunity to celebrate the continued evolution of Process Excellence and the ingenuity of those who continue to push change forward.

This entry comes from Generali, who have been shortlisted in the "Best Technology-Enabled Process Improvement Project" category.

PEX Network: Tell us about your project, why did you launch it?

We created a system supporting processes in underwriting of Large Corporate Risk in insurance companies from the first record of business opportunity, across quote preparation, approval of risk management and communication with reinsurers to policy creation.

The main reason for the project launching was an aim to decrease insurance claims through better risk management. The way we reached this goal was to map and standardize processes for a newly developed applications.

PEX Network: What were the key objectives? Did you have an end game in mind?

• To standardize business processes in the area of Large Corporate Risk.
• To eliminate paper and email communication between different roles in the process to decrease mistakes, delays and claims.
• To support a set of business and management reports helping to manage business.

PEX Network: What were the key challenges you faced during the project? How did you overcome these?

• Differences in products and processes in different insurance companies
• Local languages which we have to use in automatically generated documents and the application itself.
• Design of the target processes, which were significantly different from the original ones (supported only by MS Office).

PEX Network: Did any unforeseen benefits come out of the project?

• Including sales Pipeline Management processes into the project scope
• Possibility to track and manage work in progress.
• Time of offer creation decrease of 40% in average

PEX Network: What’s next? Is the project ongoing or are you looking to the next one?

We are finalizing the project at the end of 2014 and we will continue with continuous improvement in the application maintenance mode.

More BPM projects are planned for 2015, e.g. life insurance underwriting, pipeline management for small and middle enterprises (SMEs), insurance claims senior review.

PEX Network: What does it mean to be selected as a finalist for a PEX Award?

We really appreciate the vote of confidence, and being a finalist for a PEX Award, we believe that it helps promote visibility of our capability to create great business process and case management oriented software across Generali Group as well as it demonstrating Generali's commitment to top-level services.

PEX Network: What would your message be to others who’re looking to begin a PEX project or who are unsure where to start?

Try it, it really makes a sense. You can start by automating simple, well-known processes. In the case of more complex processes, map your business domain by identification of essential business entities (logical data structure) and wrap your processes around these entities!