Insurance firm CIS has reported savings of £30m on its
claims bill after restructuring its claims management processes and
systems around SAP software.
The motor and home insurer, which is owned by Co-operative
Financial Services, said the savings had come from process
improvements, improved anti-fraud measures and enhanced business
intelligence.
CIS embarked on a claims transformation programme 18 months ago
in a bid to better identify fraudulent claims and take out manual
and paper-based processes.
Replacing the firm’s ageing mainframe with a new system to
enable radical process change was the key challenge, with speed to
market another consideration.
Jamie Allsop, programme manager for claims transformation at
CIS, said SAP was chosen in part because CIS wanted maximum
out-of-the-box functionality.
“At the outset, the plan was to go live in July, but by keeping
customisation to a minimum we came in four months ahead of schedule
to begin the roll-out in April,” said Allsop.
“Our initial plan was less than 10% customisation, but we have
been able to improve on that partly because we could choose process
improvements that matched SAP’s functionality.”
CIS is working with SAP and Accenture to implement the system,
which has so far been rolled out to about half of its 350 motor
claims staff. Everyone on the motor side should be on the system by
the end of July, and by October its household claims handlers will
embark a similar phased transition.
The change programme has enabled CIS to reduce the number of
claims offices from 18 to seven, the company said.
“The 18 offices we once had were all generalist claims offices,”
said Allsop. “Now we have a front office running SAP that performs
a triage function and can process simple claims in its own right,
or else pass on more complex cases. With this framework in place,
we plan to eventually have the hub front-office plus just four
specialist offices.”
Alongside the SAP deployment, CIS is also using document imaging
software from Vignette, enabling the firm to move towards a
paperless environment where all documents are scanned to be
presented on the SAP workflow.
The transformation programme has seen all claims staff issued
with desktop PCs – one to four was the ratio until recently – which
run on Windows 2000 and link with IBM’s DB2 database.