Case Study
Re-insurance Finance And Operations automation with Appian
AI & Automation | Insurers | London
The Background
- The Operations department of a London based re-insurer had outline approval for a transformation programme covering people, process and data for the business outcome of enabling business growth, improving colleague experience and reducing costs
- The programme had identified automation and workflow management as a foundational component across the organisation
- The terms of reference of the transformation process required rigorous business case assessment and tracking of both costs and benefits across both financial and non-financial
- The end-end product concept, design, development and deployment services spanned over 10 weeks
- The Nextwave industry team consisted of one product owner (Partner level) and three consultant Appian engineers
The Challenge
- Forming the business case for the investment in both workflow and automation was challenging with little existing process documentation or transparency on costings of the existing operations
- Internal experience with both workflow and automation was limited but new joiners experience with Appian in previous roles had been positive
- There was an internal acceptance that for the benefits of workflow to be fully realised the workflow and automation components would need to be implemented both upstream and downstream of Operations in partnership with providing and dependent internal teams
The Approach
- The NextWave team initially assisted with the build out of the high level automation business case providing benchmarked expected costs and benefits derived from previous experience with the levels that could reasonably be expected
- Additionally the NextWave team outlined the non-financial benefits and the mapping user personas to expected colleague experiences and highlighting areas of operational risk reduction / audit improvement
- NextWave worked with the internal team to build out a list of evaluation criteria, mapped to the business requirements, for evaluation of potential candidate solutions
- The client commissioned a proof of value for Appian to prove the before and after of an existing process, which NextWave proceeded to build and demonstrate to the various stake holders showing the art-of-the possible with a known business problem.
The Impact
- The overall transformation programme supported the proof of value and provided funding for a full workflow and automation workstream
- The proof of value demonstrated built-in Appian automations covering intelligent document processing, email integration, monitoring and processing a shared in-box, sharepoint integration, robotics, automated file transfers and calling external API’s for valuations
- The proof of value also demonstrated how the previously manual process could be majority automated with colleague intervention only required for exceptions or approvals with full audit trail and single place of reference including attachments and any commentary
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