One of the leading established short-term insurers in South Africa, with operations in other African countries, recognised changing consumer needs and expectations within their industry. They identified the need to lay the foundations for digital transformation within their organisation in order to remain competitive and relevant to their customers. The client needed to align their businesses’ changing needs to strategy to ensure future projects delivered increased value.

The transformation involved mitigating business risks posed by non-supported business critical systems. One of these systems was their claims workflow system which posed compliance, technology and governance risks. They needed to undertake a technology and process refresh, focussing on the replacement of their existing claims workflow system with an off-the-shelf solution in South Africa and Namibia.

To achieve this, the client needed to understand the current state of affairs and perform an effort estimation exercise to provide recommendations for effective programme delivery. A roadmap was required to implement the solution blueprint and make this vision a reality. The client partnered with BSG to support this and the definition of business and solution architecture views impacting technology and processes in the claims business unit.

Many projects fail to align vision to delivery, diminishing their business benefit and reducing return on investment. BSG understands that business and technology architecture are key in ensuring that delivery teams do not lose sight of the end goal. Through this unique bridge between vision and execution, this transformation project was positioned to succeed in delivering business benefits.

As a result of transformation in the claims process the following benefits for the client were realised.

• Improved customer experience by decreasing claims turnaround times through process efficiency
• A consistent view of the claims strategy and its intended objectives
• Reduction in the number of manual processes resulting in cost and resource rationalisation
• Increased revenue through effective management of identified loopholes
• Providing real-time data to business for monitoring and reporting purposes

The business and technology solution roadmap done by BSG aligned the technology refresh to the businesses’ strategic vision. Bearing in mind the need for the business to save costs, the transformation reused the existing hardware platform and available resources. This fit-of-purpose solution also addressed key compliance and governance risks resulting in better data for the business and the customer.

BSG provided the guiding business, technology and project architecture to enable the project team of 30 to pull in one direction through collaboration and Agile delivery. This resulted in visible, quicker delivery of business benefits. The identification and prioritisation of focus areas resulted in aligning of effort to what matters most. The effort estimation provided confidence that the project could be delivered within planned timelines.
The client is now empowered to proactively capitalise on future opportunities by allowing the claims workflow system and processes to change on the go, with their changing business needs.