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By Joe McKendrick
Many insurers are turning to business process management (BPM) solutions to break
through the logjams caused by
stovepiped and legacy systems that hin-
der attempts to achieve greater speed to
market and nimbleness. BPM technolo-
gies help companies better automate their
processes across organizational walls,
enabling intelligent workflow automation
and straight-through processing.
However, industry surveys show such a
transformation is going to take time.
While the insurance industry—with
all its paper-intensive processes—seems
to be a natural candidate for BPM, carri-
ers have been relatively slow to adopt
the technology—perhaps slower than
many other industries. “As with so
many technologies, insurers are laggards
to adopt BPM,” says Lawrence
Danielson, principal with New York-
based Deloitte Consulting LLP. “This is
counter-intuitive because the paper-
based nature of the business is an excel-
lent fit for this technology.”
Adding to the challenge is the fact that
“the insurance industry is fraught with a
‘but-this-is-always-the-way-we’ve-done-
it’ mentality,” says Zach McCoy, SVP for
Indianapolis-based Kaplan Compliance
Solutions.

PROVEN BENEFITS
Major benefits seen from BPM efforts
include cost reduction and loss ratio
improvement. “Implementing today’s
BPM tools to triage claims and reduce
loss expenses is a clear leader given the
overall claims loss expense at P&C insur-
ers,” says Deloitte’s Danielson. Another
benefit is growth. “Agency systems and
portals that offer straight-through pro-
cessing is another BPM offering that can
provide top-line improvements.”
Underwriters can see advantages, since a
BPM-enabled system can “provide
underwriters with specific submissions
that require their unique expertise, and
offer integrated technologies that link
process and data.”
Donald Light, analyst with Boston-
based Celent, sees BPM reducing a lot of