How BPM Boosts the Binding Process at Generali: Interview with Jan Marek

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In insurance terms, "binding", is the moment that an insurance company commits to insure a third-party. It’s a process that involves the insurance provider, the insured party, and an independent insurance agent/broker; it can consist of multiple sub-processes. So would improving the binding process be an opportunity to boost productivity and increase transparency for all involved stakeholders?
Generali, a European insurance provider, certainly thought so. The company targeted the policy binding process as part of its company-wide transformation program to boost corporate efficiency. Jan Marek, BPM Team Manager at Generali, explains in more detail what the company did and how BPM software helped them to speed up the process.
PEX Network: Why was this particular process identified as a strategic opportunity for improvement?

Jan Marek: The process of policy binding in the life insurance area was identified as very important from a Service Level Agreement (SLA) and complexity point of view, because the process contains a lot of sub processes. One of the biggest problems was that the process itself was not fully transparent and measured. Users had to keep all the steps in their head and the workflows did not support any notifications.
Now, however, if the user requests documents from the client or broker the process automatically notifies the user that documents have arrived and the process may continue. We provide the business with fully customized reporting on a daily basis. Thanks to the implementation of the Bizagi BPM we are able to provide better feedback to both the client and broker about the progress of the policy binding.
PEX Network: How did you identify that a BPMS was the right route to take?
Jan Marek: We realized that the process includes a lot of different departments and users during the analysis of the process. That was our first clue that the BPMS could be a good solution for us. The BPMS from Bizagi provides plenty of possibilities to distribute the workload among our departments during the process.
We also developed our own tailor made procedure so that users can work with the queue of cases that are pending. Basically, users take batches of cases of a size they specify(they can assign up to 50 cases at one time and start working on them) and the users are also able to easily identify cases with higher priorities. We also realized that it is very crucial to provide SLAs to our business partners and we were looking for a solution that could provide this functionality out of the box.
PEX Network: What attracted you to Bizagi’s platform?
Jan Marek: This BPM suite is easy to use from a development point of view and it provides out of the box SLA reporting and a customizable front end. Those features were very important for us from the business point of view.
PEX Network: How did you approach rolling out the process and what do you think were the factors in making it a success?
Jan Marek: During the first phase of the project we were looking for a process which was currently working even if the process was not supported by BPMS. This approach allowed us to focus on the optimization and implementation of the process in a BPMS tool instead of building and defining what the process would look like. I think that, this was the main reason why we delivered this process to a production environment within 6 months with heavy integration to our Document Management System (DMS) solution.
PEX Network: What were the challenges you faced along the way?
Jan Marek: During the project we faced mainly integration problems. Later on we had to optimize the process, because the previous process contained a lot of tasks which were redundant.
PEX Network: What have been the results so far?
Jan Marek: So far we have two main critical processes in production: the medical evaluation and the risk evaluation processes, which are most important during the policy binding process. This solution has been in production for almost a year and a half and during this time our company has processed over 35, 000 cases.
PEX Network: Do you have any future plans to expand or develop this further?

We have one up and running project which is covering the policy binding and policy cancellation processes and the plan is to launch those processes in September. Later this year we would like to implement a BPMS application based on Bizagi BPM Suite which will cover compliance processes for the whole company.
To learn more about Generali’s BPM journey, click here.

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