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The second customer breakout session was Todd Lohr of Zurich North America, who discussed various process modelling initiatives within Zurich. They've expended a ton of effort on detailed as-is process mapping in order to drive process improvement, and it appears to have paid off even before implementing process automation.

They had some interesting discoveries: 4 out of 5 top activities (by time spent) did not add value to the underwriting process; many activities done by an underwriter could be done by an underwriting assistant; the start time of certain processes was causing unnecessary delays due to timing or unavailability of staff (underwriters work late, whereas the assistants work 7-3, so all assistant-level work after 3pm was done by an underwriter); and bad insurance applications (e.g., missing data) can be found and aborted earlier in the process through the appropriate triage. Having worked with a lot of insurance customers, I don't find any of these surprising, but I was impressed by the thoroughness of their as-is modelling and how they were able to exploit it to improve processes, technology and organizational structure.

They use ARIS to create the future state models and help the transition from the as-is to the to-be processes. They see it as a tool for training, simulating and communicating, as well as determine staffing and economic value of processes.

Future plans include integration of business rules, and getting some of these processes automated in a BPMS.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 05:04 PM in ARISProcessWorld2007 • BPA • EnterpriseArchitecture | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us

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