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Reliance General Insurance : Policy Kit System
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
Do you still remember the old account opening procedure in banks! One spent a
whole day filling in the lengthy form and got verifications done from different
officials. If that wasn't enough, you were called after a few days to collect
the passbook and just in case you wanted a cheque book to go with it, yet
another round of applications would begin. That has all changed with the entry
of private banks, as first the passbook was done away with and replaced with
monthly or quarterly statements and second, the cheque book has been neatly
packaged with a set of introductory documents to form a nice and handy kit, to
be carried along by the customer as soon as the application form is accepted.
The same analogy applies to insurance companies where the old procedure was more
or less similar and in some cases even worse. Customers had to follow-up at
regular intervals before the policy papers were finally dispatched to their
addresses. The Policy Kit system is an initiative aimed to reduce the TAT of the
insurance policy issuance process by introducing an OTC product.
The original idea for the system came from intense debates on how to simplify
the policy issuance procedure for Health policies which typically took 7-10 days
followed by another 10-15 days for processing a Health Card issued by a TPA. The
IT team came up with the idea of creating a product that is similar to the
account opening kit in banking. Along with the Product development team they
engaged in a series of business sessions to reengineer the operations and Sales
processes to suit such a product and delivery mechanism. The IT team developed a
front end portal based on Microsoft technologies (.NET 2.0 and SQL Server 2005)
to enable issuance of such kits at the point of Sale with minimum data entry.
The services that have been deployed to facilitate this system are SQL Server
reporting services, SQL Server integration services, Windows Communication
Services and mailing services. The system also supports multiple channels like
web, telecall and other regular channels.
As
part of Reliance General Insurance he handles business process management,
the enterprise portal, enterprise service bus besides handling the software
development team for handling initiatives on Operations, Underwriting, Human
resource,Multi Channel Sales and Marketing and Claims Management Systems
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| Prashant
Pandey, Sr Mgr - IT |
Q What was the business
problem that led you to implement this project?
The time taken for issuing a new policy to a customer used to take very
long. This led to frequent customer complaints and queries, and also loss ot
business to competition. So, we decided to have a system in place, whereby
the policy could be given over-the-counter to the customer.
Q What were the challenges
faced during this implementation?
Over the Counter Policy Issuance was a totally new Concept in terms of
implementation in insurance sector. There was a marked emphasis to reach to
customers and intermediaries through innovative and unique ways for
insurance policy sales with negligible operational TAT. A major challenge
was to implement the process within IRDA Guidelines within a stipulated
deadline of 20 days (including testing). We started with health kit
(Reliance Health wise medi-claim policy with TPA Card) distribution and
sale. The intention was to sell the policy by handing over the policy kit
immediately anywhere anytime as soon as the payment is received from the
customer. After this stage was successful, the company included more modules
for products such as Home Protect and Farmer's Package policy. The system
has been developed to handle kit distribution to all points of sale with
complete end to end tracking and reconciliation along with policy issuance
and premium calculation logic. |
Over the Counter Policy Issuance was a totally new Concept in terms of
implementation in insurance sector. There was a marked emphasis to reach to
customers and intermediaries through innovative and unique ways for insurance
policy sales with negligible operational TAT. A major challenge was to implement
the process within IRDA Guidelines within a stipulated deadline of 20 days
(including testing). They started with health kit (Reliance Health wise medi-claim
policy with TPA Card) distribution and sale. The intention was to sell the
policy by handing over the policy kit immediately anywhere anytime as soon as
the payment is received from the customer. After this stage was successful, the
company included more modules for products such as Home Protect and Farmer's
Package policy. The system has been developed to handle kit distribution to all
points of sale with complete end to end tracking and reconciliation along with
policy issuance and premium calculation logic.
 |
 |
The system was completely integrated in fully automated mode with multiple
third party administrators (TPAs). This involved several discussions required a
consensus on integration signatures with various vendors. The front end portal
was linked to the core backend using Biztalk. The risk with such a process is to
ensure that kits are easily managed on the field and a proper reconciliation is
possible at any given point of time. Do remember that the nature of the kits is
such that they can be misused easily. So a robust and secure kit allocation and
tracking module was developed to ensure risk minimization. The kit system
brought down the operational cost of issuance by half by making redundant the
logistics involved with document movement (as discussed earlier in the banking
analogy). The ease of use and simplicity of application was taken care of as the
system is to be used by various verticals. Also, as the system has to potential
to penetrate to the remotest corners, the launch involved extensive travel and
training across the length and breadth of country. Approx 3.5 lakh policies have
been sold collecting Rs 100 crore as premium within nine months of launch.
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Implementation Partner |
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Shrikant Bhosale
A G Technologies |
1. What IT solutions did you suggest to
Reliance?
To fulfill their business problem, we designed a Web based application to
make system available to all users irrespective of client system platform.
The user interfaces were intelligently designed to minimize training issues.
There are role based user friendly reports to see the stock and policy
issuance and other MIS report.
The system is flexible to incorporate new products with similar type and
accept changing business rules.
Proper project management, planned database structure and new technologies
(MS .NET Framework 2.0, BizTalk 2006 and SQL Server 2005) helped a lot to
overcome quick solution delivery, integration challenges and concurrency
problems.
2. What were the challenges that you
encountered while deploying the IT solution?
The biggest challenge was the development and rollout within 20 days of
time. Integration of our system with other core/legacy system in
heterogeneous platform was another challenge.
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