Excellence in Insurance

Michael Voelker  wrote on Targeting Excellence in National Underwriter. He discusses how a number of companies have used BPM and rules to achieve process excellent. He identifies five key points for success that are well worth reading. Two of them seem worth highlighting especially:

Target High Value Processes.
This is key to showing a decent ROI but it occurs to me that sometimes people misjudge this becuase they are looking for processes each instance of which has a high value. If you are using business rules and/or BPM then you should really be considering the total value of all instances of a process. Automation often has its best return when you make a small improvement in how a high volume process executes rather than a large improvement in how a low volume one does.

The Work is Never Done.
Plan for change, plan for maintenance, plan for evolution. And pick technology that let's you manage this "change time" effectively.  Over and over again we see customers get the real value of business rules implementations not from the intial system but from the ability to keep making changes as they see new opportunities and risks, to be agile.

For those who want to know more about Auto Club Group's implementation, check out previous entries here. There's more on change time on this blog and there's a nice example of value from ongoing change in the Egg case study.