Improve business agility
How Goudse Insurance improved their business agility with Avola Decision
Implement complex business rules quickly
Goudse Verzekeringen is a medium-sized Dutch insurer founded nearly one hundred years ago. The insurer focuses on small and medium-sized businesses in the Netherlands and works through intermediaries. Acumen, a consulting firm specializing in improving business processes, helped Goudse Verzekeringen improve their business agility. They used Avola Decision to automate decision making for two of their business processes, one for handling premium applications and one for verifying changes to personnel files in an employer portal. The application of Avola Decision resulted in shorter processing times, significant cost savings and improved flexibility.
- Consistent decisions
Operational decisions are now always consistent and reliable, increasing intermediaries’ satisfaction with Goudse Insurance - Operational excellence
Premium applications are processed automatically, allowing underwriters to spend extra time on things their expertise is really needed for
Challenge: Increase efficiency and reduce costs
To increase efficiency and save costs, Goudse Insurance began a digital transformation process five years ago. Its primary goal was to automate core processes in the organization. One of the processes Goudse Verzekeringen wanted to optimize was to process premium applications faster for intermediaries. In addition, intermediaries needed to be able to perform more processes themselves.
In addition, the manual processing of premium applications by intermediaries was time-consuming. To accept or reject a premium application, underwriters at Goudse Verzekeringen had to check many complex business rules and regulations. This led to inconsistencies and long processing times of premium applications.
Another complicating factor was that some of these complex business rules had to be applied in different applications. For example, a business rule for determining employee participation in coverage later applied again when an applicant had been accepted and his file had been added to another application.
Goudse Verzekeringen asked Acumen to assist with this challenge. Together they chose Avola Decision. The main reason for choosing this solution was that Goudse Verzekeringen wanted to reduce processing time and have more control over these premium requests. This is possible with Avola Decision.
Other important reasons were that Avola Decision is easy to interface with the Mendix low-code platform that Goudse Verzekeringen uses to develop front-end applications and the fact that Avola is a SaaS service. This allows the time required for implementation and configuration to be reduced and updates to Avola Decision always become available automatically. Business rules also do not need to be defined in code and can easily be added, saving Goudse Verzekeringen a lot of cost and energy.
Solution: implementing complex business rules quickly
Together with Acumen, Goudse Verzekeringen put all the complex rules and policies into a decision model. Goudse Verzekeringen already captured these complex business rules in Excel files, making it relatively easy for Acumen to model the Avola Business rules engine and automate decision making.
The next step was to fine-tune the business rules engine. Depending on Goudse Verzekeringen’s risk appetite, the business rules in Avola Decision were adjusted until an optimal ratio was found between premium claims that were eligible for Straight Through Processing (STP) and premium claims that had to be handled manually. The full implementation of the business rules took less than 3 months, including the fine tuning process and integration of the solution into the intermediaries’ portal.
Today, when an intermediary applies for insurance for a customer, the business rule engine automatically calculates the underwriting risk. Based on this, the intermediary’s application is automatically accepted, rejected or forwarded to an underwriter at Goudse Verzekeringen. Avola Decision’s risk assessment is based on a comprehensive set of rules that includes, for example, the industry in which the applicant operates or company names that refer to high-risk industries such as arms trafficking. For Goudse Verzekeringen’s underwriters, this means that they now only have to manually check cases coming out of the system, which has significantly sped up the verification process for premium applications.
Employer portal ‘my staff’
Another business process Acumen automated with Avola Decision was verifying changes to employee data in “my staff,” an employer portal Goudse Insurance built for customers. The Avola business engine verifies changes in salaries, for example, to validate employee coverage.
This is how we work
Benefits: Consistent decisions and operational excellence
Goudse Verzekeringen benefits from several advantages by using Avola Decision. First, intermediaries no longer have to know by heart all the complex rules about whether or not to accept an applicant. Also, operational decisions are now always consistent and reliable, increasing intermediaries’ satisfaction with Goudse Verzekeringen.
Second, because many premium applications are processed automatically,
underwriters can spend additional time on matters that require their expertise. As a result, Goudse Insurance is now achieving a higher level of operational excellence.
In addition, Goudse Verzekeringen’s flexibility has increased as business rules can be easily modified. When changes occur, they can now be added directly to Avola Decision, allowing the insurer to go “live” with a new business rule within a day without requiring IT staff to make changes to the software code.
The Avola Business rule engine can also be used in different applications. So if a business rule applies to one application, it is also applicable later when an applicant’s data is transferred to another application.
Transparency
The decision-making process regarding the acceptance of applicants for Goudse Verzekeringen’s group insurance policies is now fully transparent and consistent. By defining business rules in Avola Decision, all business rules are now brought together in one central system, which makes it much easier for auditors of government agencies tasked with monitoring compliance to verify business rules.
Paul Veerkamp, Managing Partner at Acumen: “By breaking down complex organizational decisions into business rules in Avola Decision, Goudse Verzekeringen can now implement any desired change quickly and in a controlled manner. They can act quickly and easily adapt their policies to changes in the market without first having to develop, test and live a software solution. This has significantly improved their business agility. Take the Corona crisis, for example. Within two days after the crisis began, Goudse Insurance adjusted their business rules so that the system took Corona into account when determining underwriting risk. This speed and flexibility is unprecedented.”
Willem Wierikx, ICT DevOps Team Manager, Goudse Insurance: “With Avola Decision, fewer underwriters are needed to process more premium requests, so implementing this solution has resulted in significant cost savings and it has significantly improved our efficiency. Our underwriters save valuable time in determining whether or not to accept applications and can now fully focus on things that require their expertise, which benefits Goudse Insurance’s operational excellence.”
- Implement complex business rules quickly
Consistent decisions and operational excellence - Preliminary testing of adjustments
Make simulations so that consequences can be understood - Suitable for use by business specialists
Without IT knowledge always up-to-date
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