Sundaram Business Services (SBS) worked in partnership with a leading Indian life insurer in managing a network of over 2,000 agents. SBS took over a non-standard process with little or no standard reporting procedures. The resultant process improvements resulted in a 50% drop in turnaround time for key processes as well as up-to-date MIS to allow appropriate decisions.
Country: India
Industry: Financial Services
Situation
The client is a subsidiary of one of India’s leading industrial groups, which acquired a Life Insurance company that distributed products through a network of more than 180 branches and 2000 agents.
Challenge
The company had aspirations to grow rapidly. Managing the agent’s database was a major pain-point. This included allotting agent codes for new agents, processing agents’ application forms, ensuring agents had completed the required hours of training, and processing agent payments. While most of the required data was captured, there was no clearly defined process, and no standard format for data capture. There was also no data validation that allowed early correction of incomplete/incorrect entries.
All this meant that getting timely information for decision-making was a complex (and ad-hoc) task. There was no standard reporting system in place, and our client was ‘flying blind’
The requirement was a solution that would:
- Make data access easy across the organization
- Help launch new products quickly
- Be adaptable to meet organizational requirements
- Enhance customer satisfaction and improve operational ease.
SBS Solution
- SBS undertook a detailed process study to migrate an “as-is” process. In addition, SBS deployed insurance processing and IT experts, who made several process improvement suggestions that were implemented while transitioning the process. These included
An SBS designed standard template to streamlined data capture.
- Streamlined data structures that ensured that ‘standard’ and ‘varying’ data were captured separately
- Creation of an IT architecture that facilitated quick accessibility of data (shared server model)
- MIS designed jointly with the client, to ensure process status could be tracked on a daily basis
- SBS deployed a processing team, including personnel experienced in insurance processing to handle the client’s needs. The team also handled processing of entries and data consolidation for the client’s agency operations.
Impact
- SBS gave the client quick and easy access to data, ensuring that the right reports were at hand for decision makers.
- Allowed the client to focus on their core activity of insurance distribution (vs. administering the agency network)
- Reduced turn around time by 50%; from 3 days to 36 hours.
- Improved over all productivity by 40 %
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