The IT infrastructure of most insurance carriers; Life, Property & Casualty, and Healthcare have not met the operational demands for increased efficiency and business process flexibility. Tolerance for minimal integration and marginal automation between legacy systems and modern technology is at an end. Over the past three years, fierce competition and market forces have spurred insurance carriers to engage in aggressive Straight Through Processing (STP) initiatives.

Straight Through Processing is an IT framework that helps insurers automate business processes and more deeply integrate their enterprise systems. STP applies enabling technologies such as document imaging, rules engines and workflow thereby creating entirely new business processes with measurably improved automation. It is not surprising that Gartner Inc. is reporting "adoption of STP techniques offer opportunities to improve top-line growth and achieve bottom-line savings while improving customer and producer satisfaction."¹

FJA offers a disciplined approach and pragmatic enterprise tools that can help insurance carriers automate business processes and ultimately reap the benefits of STP.

Insurance product and enterprise workflow are where STP initiatives must start in order to drive efficiency and consistency throughout the organization. A progressive transformation of IT infrastructure requires a unified product platform that delivers a high degree of automation and openly integrates with legacy, as well as modern technology.

STP must begin with a focus on Product

The source of revenue for insurance carriers is product. The business drive of insurance carriers is to provide brokers and agents with the products end users want and need in the most efficient and profitable manner possible.

Product information must be transformed into an automated and centralized repository the organization and its IT systems can access and rely upon. This requires a manufacturing engineering approach, a product component architecture. Component taxonomy is a valuable asset required to achieve STP. FJA’s Product Machine provides insurance carriers with a unified product platform, product modeling capabilities and a centralized repository for all product components, for all lines of business.

Measurable progress toward STP are achieved with FJA's Product Machine.

• Automated workflows and a streamlined product configuration process increases operational productivity.
• Current, accurate and consistent product information is served to all down stream systems.
• Product retrieval and change management is automated.
• Product, benefit, policy and compliance document production is simplified and automated.
• EIM ( Exception Interception Model) labor intensive processes are minimized and redundant tasks are completely eliminated.
• Integration with legacy and modern systems is achieved through the application of point-solutions, APIs or automated turn-key cross-walks.

Minimally integrated business processes and IT systems require either human intervention or batch processes to achieve data flow across applications. A well-integrated and operationally efficient system, such as the Product Machine facilitates data flow with minimal need for manual intervention or batch processes.

Efficient flow of control across system roles is achieved via software tools. For example, a role-player such as an underwriter takes control of a case/policy and completes a set of activities such as risk assessment on the case/product. Once this role player has completed the required set of activities, the case/product control flows to the next roll player in the business process. A well-automated system facilitates the efficient flow of control through the role players of a use-case. A role player (user) takes control of a case/product at any point in the use-case to complete tasks. Decision support systems such as business rule or rating engines used in conjunction with a workflow engine enable efficient process automation. FJA's solution set is optimized for data and control flows across a unified product platform.

Schedule your customized STP session today.
Call Marc Dutton at (212) 840-2618
Email: Advantage@fja.com

1. Gartner Inc., Kimberly Harris-Farrante, V.P. June 3, 2010