Process Automation: Global Insurance Provider Enforces Compliance and Mitigates Risk with HotDocs
An international insurance conglomerate specializing in property, casualty, professional, and specialty insurance products for some of the world’s leading industrial and commercial enterprises had a common problem: it needed to systematize the process of generating complex, policy-related documentation. The company’s goal went beyond merely creating greater efficiency (the core value proposition driving worldwide adoption of process-automation software, often referred to as BPM); in addition, the company also sought to mitigate risk by enforcing compliance and best practices across its enterprise, which is distributed throughout more than 100 countries.
The responsibility for producing custom documentation sets for policies resides with the company’s General Liability and Professional Lines departments, which quote, bind, and issue insurance and reinsurance policies to the company’s global client base. Operating with disparate legacy systems and antiquated processes that slowed the document generation process, the company made the commitment to upgrade its methodology.
“The company’s issuance process was extremely time intensive,” pointed out one of the company’s technical underwriters. “On any given policy, we could spend hours re-keying client data, searching, and replacing key items, such as client names, dates, and other policy-specific information, and proofing final documents.” The underwriter goes on to explain that the company’s methodology resulted in “compromised” work product. “The big thing was repetitive errors and internal inconsistencies within policies,” she stated. “That’s more than just embarrassing; it’s dangerous. What we needed was to automate the process, that is, implement technology to handle all the rule-based, repetitive aspects of document production.”
To streamline the process, the insurance giant turned to HotDocs. The company began by transforming its documents and forms into HotDocs process applications. As the underwriter explained it, ”The [transformation] process involved identifying non-static components in each document and replacing them with HotDocs variables. We also built logic into the documents that included or excluded blocks of text based, on case-specific facts. We then designed custom interviews for each document with built-in safeguards, such as range and date validations and question-specific help resources, so that virtually anyone in [any of our field offices] could safely generate custom documentation sets.”
To further safeguard the process, the company configured HotDocs to output policy documentation directly to PDF, enabling non policy-issuance staff to access finalized documents as a reference without the ability to amend them, a procedure which the company considers to be a vital step in mitigating risk by enforcing compliance to internal and external regulations.
“The bottom line,” explained the agent, “is that HotDocs enables us to generate documentation for complex policies significantly faster and with much greater accuracy than we did before. Not only is our work product better, but we’ve eliminated production backlog, which allows us to provide our customers with better service.”