The pressure to prioritize enterprise-wide digital transformation has never been more intense for those in the insurance industry. To keep up with the modernization movement, insurance companies have tasked their IT teams with numerous initiatives that are creating an increasingly complex IT environment.

Businesses are coordinating the maintenance of legacy policy, billing, and claims systems while implementing cloud software, job schedulers, virtualization, homegrown scripts, and more. This balancing act is not only overwhelming, it can also be very costly if it’s not executed carefully.

Enter OpCon—SMA’s modern-day workload automation solution that’s built with today’s IT challenges in mind. OpCon enables you to streamline your processes and eliminate manual tasks, so you can free up your IT staff—allowing them to focus on the strategic work your insurance business needs to keep up with the competition.

Less Downtime

OpCon is designed to run on dedicated servers, so your jobs can run even when the mainframe is down or undergoing routine maintenance.

“With [our prior scheduling solution], if we had to take the mainframe down, all our agents stopped running,” says Deb Brugma, Manager of the Operations Team at Ameritas, one of the largest insurance holding companies in the U.S. with 4.9 million customers nationwide.

“With OpCon, if we need to conduct routine maintenance, our agents continue to run on their own, because they work independently from the mainframe.”

Better Reporting

Since it's built on a powerful SQL database, OpCon offers a virtually unlimited range of customized reporting options to meet any organization’s unique needs.

These dynamic reporting capabilities opened up a “world of possibilities” for Ameritas, according to Ed Watson, Systems Programmer. “Reporting will be a lot easier in the long run than it was with [our prior scheduler], which only offered a few canned reports but little customization.”

Lower Total Cost of Ownership

Workload automation brings unprecedented efficiencies into your insurance operations, helping to reduce staffing and other operational expenses and enable remarkably short payback periods.

Plus, OpCon offers fully transparent, easy-to-understand billing with no hidden fees, allowing you to forecast ROI for your business more accurately.

Crucial Disaster Recovery Protection

When Noridian Mutual Insurance Company’s main data center flooded, OpCon helped the insurer’s operations get back up and running in record time, with no jobs missed or run out of sequence.

Massive Error Reduction

Before implementing OpCon, Noridian’s human operators managed over 800 processes per day, leading to an unacceptably high rate of human error. Thanks to OpCon’s event-driven automation, human intervention has been minimized and all of Noridian's jobs now run accurately, helping to prevent out-of-sequence errors.

OpCon provides a broad set of sophisticated features that are incredibly easy to set up and use – allowing insurance businesses of all sizes to easily scale their automation across a wide range of various jobs. OpCon’s unique, best-in-market features include:

Event-Driven Commands

OpCon can receive events from any system and schedule jobs based on several variables. In essence, any system that can generate a text file can interact with OpCon.

Frequency Scheduling

Control triggers for when tasks run through rules instead of defined schedules to reduce errors and save time maintaining calendars.

Master/Daily Scheduling

Maintain jobs and the frequencies they run, providing visibility into what runs today and in the future.

Multi-Instance Scheduling

Reuse workflows with variable parameters to eliminate the need to create new workflows each time.

Advanced Failure Criteria

Control the most complex applications to create clean workflows and eliminate unexpected failures.

Expressions

Flexibly define the order of when tasks and processes run to provide superior control to help meet your business needs.

Fast, Easy Automation, with Minimal Coding Skills Required

SMA’s Self Service platform is designed specifically for business users to reduce your IT team’s workload. Non-IT users are able to trigger automated processes with the click of a button.

Plus, with OpCon’s low-code capabilities, most automation tasks can be done without having to write scripts - making it very simple to use, even for inexperienced staff. Did we also mention we offer free basic training, too?

Fast, Risk-free Deployment

SMA’s experienced teams can get automation up and running for your insurance business in weeks, not months. By employing a proven migration toolkit and templates, SMA has successfully migrated hundreds of thousands of jobs. This helps ensure that any migration from existing tools is fast and effective. Best of all, it helps you see value fast.

A good rule of thumb: if you have to do something more than once, automate it.

Once you automate a business process, it’s like having your most reliable employee running it perfectly every single time. With OpCon’s advanced workload automation and orchestration solution, your IT staff has the power to set and forget an infinite number of processes, freeing them to focus on higher-level strategic initiatives for your organization. Just as importantly, automation significantly reduces the risk of error that comes with running processes manually.

Expertise to Guide You

SMA’s automation experts bring decades of experience automating complex business processes in insurance. We’ve got installation and migration from your existing, outdated scheduler down to a fine-tuned process. Our consultants can typically get your team fully trained and ready to go live with the automation of key back-office processes within weeks.

Maximizing Your ROI

SMA offers no-cost, unlimited basic training for the life of your contract. We know that getting a strong ROI requires earning the full confidence of your team, so we provide them with the necessary skills not only to run your core ERP processes, but to expand automation to other business units - creating even more value.