Improve business agility
How ‘de Goudse Verzekeringen’ 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 claims 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 had to be able to perform more processes themselves.
Moreover, the manual processing of premium applications by intermediaries took a lot of time. To accept or reject a premium application, acceptors at Goudse Insurance had to check many complex business rules and regulations. This led to inconsistencies and long processing times of premium claims.
Another complicating factor was that some of these complex business rules had to be implemented in different applications. For example, a company 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 Insurance asked Acumen to assist in this challenge. Together, they chose Avola Decision. The main reason for choosing this solution was that Goudse Insurances wanted to reduce processing time and have more control over these premium requests. You can do this with Avola Decision.
Other key reasons were that Avola Decision easily interfaces 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 can reduce the time required for implementation and configuration, and updates to Avola Decision will always be available automatically. Business rules also do not need to be captured in code and can easily be added, saving Goudse Insurance 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 Insurance 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 client, the business rule engine automatically calculates underwriting risk. On this basis, 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 include, 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 insurers, this means that they now only have to manually verify cases coming out of the system, which has significantly sped up the verification process for premium applications.
Employer portal ‘my staff’
Another business process that Acumen automated with Avola Decision was verifying changes to employee data in “my staff,” an employer portal that Goudse Insurance built for customers. The Avola business engine checks changes in salaries, for example, to validate employee coverage.
This is how we work
Benefits: Consistent decisions and operational excellence
Goudse Insurance benefits from several advantages by using Avola Decision. First, intermediaries no longer need 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 Insurance.
Second, because many premium applications are processed automatically,
acceptors can spend additional time on issues that require their expertise. As a result, Goudse Insurance is now achieving a higher level of operational excellence.
In addition, Goudse Insurance’s flexibility has increased as business rules can be easily modified. If there are changes, 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 various 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, making 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 flexibility. 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.”
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