Next-Level Intelligent Automation (IA) Subtracts Manual Effort While Adding Efficiency

When it comes to manual processes, no industry is being stressed more than insurance.

Processes across the value chain, from new business to servicing to claims to accounting, have traditionally been fraught with cumbersome and costly manual interventions.

So many critical processes. Too many hands. So little time.

The good news is that intelligent automation (IA), also referred to as intelligent process automation (IPA), is making a positive difference in the performance of both back- and front- office systems in the insurance industry.

Here are 12 examples of how Sutherland Robility^TM and other next-level automation solutions are leveraging the digital transformation in insurance to make vital processes less cumbersome and more efficient.

1. Untangling Manual Complexity in Claims

One of our insurer clients—a $7 billion property and casualty specialty underwriter—was wrangling first notice of loss (FNOL) manual paper claims submissions in multiple formats and supporting documents in different Acord versions. Poor standardization made it cumbersome to ingest claims into their multiple legacy systems.

Sutherland Xtract^TM eliminated manual inputs with digitization at the source. A single claims interface reduced data entry and automatically assigned claims processors. Optical character recognition (OCR) and an API were integrated with Sutherland Robility to automate the entire FNOL management and servicing process.

72% Reduction in average handle time in FNOL operations
95% Extraction accuracy from optical character recognition

2. Streamlining Unorganized Underwriting Submission Data

Our client, an international underwriter specializing in insurance and reinsurance in the property and casualty market, was dissatisfied with their highly manual underwriting approval process. Submissions data was disorganized, and underwriters needed to make sense of it to review against guidelines. Saddling brokers with lengthy wait times for an accept or decline was unacceptable.

Sutherland helped our client to gain a step ahead with process reengineering, through an underwriting guidelines system that enabled upfront declination of submissions. The Sutherland Service Reunification Layer captured valid submission data to present to underwriters via a one-screen submission review system. It all added up to faster review submissions and quicker quotes release to brokers. This capability boosted our client’s prospects for winning new business.

60% Reduction in average handle time
87% Faster turnaround time for final review

3. Intelligent Automation Calls Out Nonproductive Audits

The process of non-productive audits produce an “estimated audit” that increases cost over the original estimate and a cancellation notice. This process to eliminate non-productive audits involves arduous manual effort to identify nonproductive audits from thousands of inputs.

For a property & casualty insurance and reinsurance client of our end-to-end implementation of a Robility RPA bot automated identification and indexing of nonproductive audits based on description, time, and date. The resulting information on audits is then sent to the auditors via email.

50% Cut in average handle time and bots
95% Accuracy of deliverables from nonproductive audit queues with end-to-end automation

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4. Premium Adjustments Hit the Accuracy Bullseye

Manually generating endorsements for premium adjustment has been a familiar story in the insurance industry. The process is highly manual, requires validation of all the fields by the user, and increases the chance of an incorrect premium adjustment when the document is generated.

For an international underwriter of specialty insurance and reinsurance products in the property & casualty markets, Sutherland completely re-engineered the adjustments process, implementing automation of the endorsement adjustment and document generation.

90% Less manual effort
95% Accuracy from end-to-end automation of audit waver queues

5. Higher Policy Booking Quality, Lower Effort

Policy booking is still another manual process ripe for automation. For the casualty and construction business of one of our insurance clients, policy booking processes were highly manual, with an additional 20% review effort required for ensuring quality, given the criticality of the business.

Sutherland Robility™ was deployed to cover over 90% of the booking process. An application programming interface (API) was set up to integrate with the client’s other applications, which meant our automation solution had no downstream impact of a user interface changes in core applications.

80% Less manual effort
90% Accuracy on booking queue deliverables

6. Fewer Errors & Omissions

Newly issued policy documents need to be accurate. Our client needed to raise the standards of Errors & Omissions policy generation to achieve near perfection.

Sutherland re-engineered the policy issuance process in adherence with the guidelines to produce zero errors while issuing a new policy. Robility™ automated generation of documents, as well as the ability to quickly extract the details of any E&O policy.

50% Cut in average handle time with bots
95% Accuracy in policy issuance

7. Breaking Through the Binder Bind

Binder completion is a repetitive, work intensive task and can take up to 15 minutes for each transaction. Agents must examine hundreds of lines of text while pushing to meet tight 24-hour SLAs. Keeping one eye on the clock while the other plows through policy text isn’t the most efficient system.

At Sutherland, we developed a solution to automate processing of five tasks: fetch to-do data; identify task actions; extract data; rule-based processing and email actions. Our Sutherland Extract solution automated the data extraction, while Robility™ performed several actions in the background to reduce having to interact with the user interface for each task.

80% Fewer full-time employees (FTEs) in decline submissions
30% Faster turnaround time

8. A Mission to Speed Declined Submissions

In the insurance business, an underwriter’s time is often more precious than gold. While underwriters evaluate and decline new submissions, underwriter assistants provide support by pulling those submissions to better understand the reasons behind declines. Assistants had to launch multiple systems to update rejection reasons. Again, more heavy manual lifting devours valuable hours, increasing costs.

A bot was designed by Sutherland to fetch tasks directly from queue management. The status and sub-status of the policy is identified in a tool using API Services. Based on policy status, the bot launches an application to mark the policy as declined and choose the appropriate sub-status automatically.

70% Less manual effort
60% Faster turnaround time

9. Unclogging the Monthly Endorsements Logjam

Our leading US insurance company client had challenges updating monthly endorsements on policies in a timely fashion. Underwriter assistants had to extend, cancel or reinstate policies in addition to other endorsements. The result was a drag on monthly closing activity.

A custom Robility™ bot was armed with specific business rules to identify an endorsement type and take the necessary actions on the policy. This helped underwriter assistants focus on their month’s projects and meet SLA requirements. The flexible Sutherland solution opened the way for additional volume as business scales up.

60% Less manual effort
40% Faster turnaround time

10. Making Loss Runs Less of a Sprint

Loss run reports are complicated enough as it is. To identify claim history, our client’s insurance claim team’s inputs are scrutinized with the generated loss run report. Every report is analyzed. Reports were manually extracted and validated, causing errors during the monthly closing rush.

This challenge is another great fit for Sutherland Robility™. This IPA tool was configured to pull current loss reports to upload to underwriters and assistant underwriters. Robility was configured to handle high volumes and peak rush of month end closing.

90% Less manual effort
95% Accuracy on deliverables in loss run queues

11. Putting More Automatic into Automatic Renewals

Like any other insurance company, our client had a highly manual policy renewal process. Renewals can be fairly automated if those policies eligible for renewal clear some specific business validations.

To make a transformational reduction in manual handling, Sutherland designed a bot solution using UIPath. Bots were used to fetch the policy details from renewal app database and compare it with previous and current year’s details. Once the defined rules were met, the policy was renewed, and the customer notified. These renewal bots are on-call 24/7, handling approximately 2,500 renewals monthly.

80% Less manual effort
90% Successful automated renewals

12. A Solution for Keeping Fewer Customers in Suspense

Our customer, a US life Insurer and one of the largest mutual life insurance companies in the world, had a problem. Their suspense accounts balance was burdensome. The culprits? Poor data quality and inefficient manual check-matching. The error-prone process left customers displeased, and a solution had to be found.

The end-to-end Sutherland suspense reduction transformation included several products. Sutherland Robility™ provided an integrated search function to fetch data from legacy systems. Intelligent reporting from Sutherland Perform™ analytics provided critical data to resolve suspense accounts. And the Sutherland service unification layer improved receipting payment process workflows.

50% Reduction in suspense accounts in less than six months
75% Less manual intervention

What’s Your Challenge?

Let’s Talk Process and Priorities.

At Sutherland, we practice a process-focused approach to automation. This means that before we ever start talking about our products, we first talk about your process.

We perform holistic discovery of your current operating procedures with process and task mining. Our teams identify those processes with the highest return value based on simplification, standardization, and elimination of manual work.

Our primary focus? Operational efficiency. Customer and employee experience.

This groundwork lays the foundation of an outcome-driven automation strategy leveraging our products and solutions. We use this structured approach to calculate your ROI and set realistic expectations and priorities.

What are your current insurance process challenges? We’re eager to hear about them and get you started on the path to higher process speed, improved accuracy, and greater profitability.

Services
Application Services, Automation, Digital CX

Industry
Insurance