processing. Some companies use their
system to automatically renew a policy if
there haven’t been any significant exposure changes or large losses and where
the policy continues to fit a company’s
underwriting appetite. This frees the
underwriters to use their expertise on
those cases that require analysis and
evaluation.
a Culture of Change
Before any of this can begin, you need to
ensure your company respects and supports a culture of change. Commitment
from the top is critical to making change
happen, not for change’s sake, but rather
for continual improvement and efficiency. Making your business processes
better and more efficient ultimately leads
to better and more responsive customer
service, the most critical factor ensuring
your company’s success.
Taking good care of our customers
is what will keep them customers. It is
important that they are satisfied. Their
expectations are constantly changing
quickly as well. Their life experience in
everything they do and their interactions
with other companies drives their expectations of you. As a result, they want
to have current information when they
want it on their terms, not yours. They
want to do things electronically, not fill
out forms you send them only to have to
mail them back. All that said, you need
to change how you do things to meet
your customers’ needs if you want to
keep them. And don’t for a minute think
you know what their expectations are
unless you’ve asked them recently.
Process change must become a part
of your company’s DNA. You can’t sit
back and wait to see what your competitors are doing before you start to think
about what has to happen. That’s too late.
You’ll be in a constant “catch up” mode.
You need to lead that charge and make
your company be the leader—the change
agent. Examine processes regularly and
encourage and endorse suggestions for
improvement from those who are work-
ing those processes.
Many companies have already recog-
nized that change is critical to success and
started to change business processes or
implement new system solutions. There
could be many reasons driving the de-
cision to replace a current system with a
new one: productivity and efficiency im-
provements; speed to market; competitive
pressures; replacement of legacy systems;
or simply better customer service.
There are many more specific reasons. It is important to note, however,
that simply implementing a new system
is not necessarily going to achieve any
of those results. That seems contrarian,
right? Well, actually, if you think about it,
simply replacing an existing system with
a new system does nothing for you other
than doing what you currently do faster
with newer technology. Remember the
expression “putting lipstick on a pig?”
Well, if you build the new system to do
exactly what you are currently doing,
that’s what you’ll have.
Selecting a new system is a long
and tedious process and once you have
selected that perfect vendor, everyone
wants to get moving to get it implemented. Two words of advice at this point:
slow down. Here is the perfect opportunity for you to take advantage of that
change culture we were talking about.
Obviously, there were financial considerations built into the proposal to implement this new system. In order to achieve
that, you made certain assumptions about
productivity improvements, revenue gains
due to system efficiencies, etc. You will
never realize them if you don’t take a step
back and revisit every workflow and every
business process before you tell your selected vendor what to build.
Take the time to challenge everything
you do. Don’t settle for “we’ve always
done it that way.” Doing it the same way
in the new system leads to what? Or to
use Einstein’s definition of insanity in this
systems context…doing the same thing
over again in a new system with advanced
technology achieves insanity sooner.
realize the efficiencies
In my experience, I’ve implemented systems both ways. In fact, I implemented a
great new solution with the same business
processes, reports, and flows that were in
place with the old system. Guess what, all
that new efficiency was wiped out by all
the custom code that had to be written
BPM: Curse or Opportunity?
You can’t sit
back and wait
to see what your
competitors are
doing before you
start to think
about what has to
happen.
