How Workload Automation Helps Insurance Companies Achieve Better ROI

Insurance companies are facing numerous headwinds, ranging from the rising cost of claims to an uncertain economic outlook and an increasing regulatory burden, particularly in the areas of data protection and privacy.

To respond and adjust to this evolving landscape, many insurance firms have aggressively pursued system modernization in recent years. In fact, technology and IT spending across the insurance industry is expected to increase by more than 25% between 2022 and 2026, building on an established trend of rising IT costs for insurance companies, ostensibly driven by system modernization.

But the increasing complexity of the insurance technology stack brings its own set of challenges. Insurance companies typically employ a variety of technology solutions to serve key functions, including point of sale (POS) and customer onboarding, underwriting, policy management, claims management, processing, billing, and more.

Unfortunately, many of these discrete systems don’t communicate with each other effectively. This problem is particularly acute when firms employ a mix of homegrown and commercially available solutions, but it persists even with integrated commercial suites, due to the prevalence of multiple customizations and operational silos.

This lack of communication and collaboration means that insurance companies are often challenged to integrate processes across multiple systems and departments—projects that require manual effort and take longer than they should.

This is why many insurers that have pursued digital transformation have not realized the expected return on investment, at least not yet. From 2016 to 2021, personal property and casualty carriers saw an average 5% reduction in operating costs. But these gains were more than offset by a 7% increase in IT costs, driven mainly by “system modernization.”

Here’s how implementing a modern-day workload automation and orchestration solution like OpCon can help your insurance company overcome these challenges and achieve superior return on your technology investments.

Achieving superior ROI through workload automation

• Reduce costs to capture ROI faster.
  Return on investment (ROI) is the key metric for judging the ultimate success of a systems modernization project. That’s why firms must capitalize on any opportunity to capture savings up front through improved operational efficiencies. By implementing a modern-day workload automation and orchestration (WLA&O) solution in key operational processes like policy management, claims processing, and billing, insurance companies can begin capturing superior project ROI within just two to three months.
  
  In fact, organizations that use OpCon WLA&O to its full potential save over $375,000 on average every year.*
• Increase efficiency.
  By leveraging the enterprise power and scalability of a solution like OpCon to automate workloads throughout the organization, insurers can significantly reduce the number and complexity of manual processes, enabling them to capture greater efficiency and cost savings.
  
  “With OpCon, we have the capability to schedule across all environments: in the cloud, on servers, and on the mainframe,” says Deb Brugman, Manager of the Operations Team at Ameritas, one of the largest insurance holding companies in the U.S. “Now, we’ve got the software in place, and we’re ready to start scheduling. We're ready to start moving forward.”
• Ensure more simplicity and fewer errors.
  OpCon delivers fast, easy automation without exhaustive training or specialized coding skills. SMA’s Self Service Interface was designed specifically for business users to help reduce the load on the IT department.
  
  “OpCon’s schedule build feature is incredibly simple to use,” says Kenneth Bush of Ameritas. “It’s just a matter of holding one cycle and adding a schedule build, and we’re off and running. Even our programmers praise OpCon’s ‘wizardry’.”
• Achieve better system integration and interoperability.
  Employing a leading enterprise workload automation and orchestration solution enables organizations of any size to manage highly complex environments from a single, central source of truth.
  
  “Without licensing restrictions, we are empowered to put OpCon agents anywhere,” says Tony Reilman, Enterprise Solution Manager at Ameritas. “We’ve added more agents with OpCon than we did over the previous ten years that I’ve worked here. It’s exciting to see how we can control more of our operations from a central location—OpCon.”
• Retain institutional knowledge.
  Technical talent is at a premium today. The insurance industry faces an exodus of institutional knowledge over the next few years as the Boomer generation retires, which has yet to be replaced due to the ongoing shortage of high-level technical talent on the market today. By automating manual processes and documenting procedures for those that will continue to require human intervention, organizations can offset the impacts of future brain drain.
• Achieve better security and compliance.
  Automation enhances security and compliance by easing the management of role-based privileges and automatically logging all activities for auditing purposes. From improving business continuity with self-healing routines designed to keep operations humming even during unplanned interruptions to orchestrating complex managed file transfers across the enterprise and third-party organizations, workload automation and orchestration can solve a virtually unlimited number of operational challenges.
• Improve processes throughout the insurance lifecycle.
  Modern workload automation solutions can integrate scripts of any language across the insurance systems landscape into end-to-end, cross-platform workflows. Through enterprise-level power and flexibility, WLA can help insurers manage siloed technologies from legacy systems to the cloud, virtualization, and Internet of Things (IoT) through a single, integrated platform.

Beginning with POS and CRM, continuing through policy and claims management, and ending with the company’s core financial system and data warehousing, WLA&O can simplify data management and remove IT complexity from third-party, disparate, and legacy systems across the entire insurance process lifecycle.

For example, WLA&O can synchronize claims system data and reduce claim settlement cycle time by ensuring your claims teams have the data they need to start and end their day. With increased visibility across multiple departments and systems, and using OpCon’s advanced, integrated notification features, all advanced personnel will be fully in the loop to know when a process starts, finishes, or needs attention.

Planning to modernize your insurance technology stack to achieve optimal ROI? Learn how the industry’s most powerful workload automation and orchestration solution, OpCon from SMA Technologies, can save you money and give time back. Connect with us today at contact@smatechnologies.com.

*Based on conservative internal calculations by SMA Technologies for OpCon customers that automate at a pace of 105 seconds per task (i.e., 30 seconds to key a manual task, 60-second wait time between tasks, and 15 seconds to verify successful completion of the previous task) at a rate of $34.85 per hour (i.e., average hourly rate for a full-time employee assuming no premium pay for overtime, holidays, nights, or weekends). These calculations don’t include any expenses for errors, re-processing, or other manual operations-related items.