Accelerate Insurance Testing with our BPT accelerators

Everyone knows that automated testing can save insurance companies time and money. The testing processes become less error-prone and test execution windows become smaller, larger data volumes can be used to more test scenarios in a shorter period of time. Automated testing is great for regression testing as it helps you to quickly confirm that functionality developed for new releases has not in some way adversely affected your existing policy or claims administration functionality.

Not everyone knows that insurance companies might be losing money by implementing test automation in an inefficient manner.

You may be repeatedly creating automated test scripts for controls reused on multiple screens. To give a very simplistic example, if you have got an automated script to test address capture controls for a broker screen, you certainly don’t want to build it all over again when testing address controls on any other partner related screen.

You may be wasting effort building scripts for testing common business processes. Automated test scripts for key standard functions on vanilla installation of the product might be procured at a low price. You could easily reuse these with only minimal changes which reflect the difference between the way you do business and the way your competition does and thereby save a great deal of money on test script development effort.

We suggest that you look out for a good Business Process testing accelerator when buying a test automation product. Such products can save you time and effort that you would otherwise expend on developing automated test scripts which are already cheaply available. Hexaware supplies outstanding 3^rd generation test accelerators built on HP software to its insurance customers. These include accelerators for SAP, Peoplesoft, Siebel etc. You can read more about these at http://www.hexaware.com/business-process-testing-accelerators.htm

Hexaware has recently come up with a BPT test accelerator based on the above principles for the eBaoTech General Policy Administration System. The value proposition of this BPT accelerator is  as below

• Non-technical “Building-Block” approach to test design – non-technical Subject Matter Experts (SME) can easily assemble test scenarios by assembling out of box business components built for auto industry functionality on eBaoTech GS using “drag-and-drop”
• Automatic creation and upload of reusable components – Hexaware’s User Interface Scanner automatically discovers metadata specific to your eBaoTech GS instance and creates additional components automatically. This is very useful to keep track of new components that get created as the application evolves and moves away from the vanilla configuration and it can save months in test development time.
• Easy Integration Testing – Inbound and Outbound interfaces to and from eBaoTech GS with any application (Legacy or web-based) can be automated using the BPT accelerator.
• Repeatable and reusable – Pre-built components are easily uploaded and fully integrated with a centralized test management tool in minutes.
• Elimination of up-front development time – It enables your testing teams to begin test design process earlier in the Software Development Life Cycle.
• Reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) – Reusable library of scripts cuts Test Maintenance costs and reduces the time taken to assemble new functional test scenarios.

To summarize BPT accelerators from Hexaware for the eBaoTech system and ERPs like PeeopleSoft, Siebel and SAP are a worthwhile investment. These products emphasize reuse of prebuilt business processes and automate discovery of changes to components thereby saving you dollars in the test development process.

Strategy for developing Mobile applications for Insurance

Smart phones such as iPhones, Blackberries, Windows Phones and now Android phones are revolutionizing the way we use the internet.  According to Gartner Research, mobile phones are set  to overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide by 2013(http://www.gartner.com/resId=1268513). It is no wonder therefore, that many of our insurance clients are looking out for applications to exploit the mobile phone revolution.

Their key question usually is where to begin?  What to develop and how?  Do we develop apps for Claims reporting to record Auto Insurance FNOLs? Do we provide our agents with premium calculators? Shall we provide apps for clients to view policy status, pay premium online etc?

To get you started, we give below a few key factors to consider when evolving your insurance mobile services strategy.

Wide acceptance and ease of use by potential users: You need to prioritize apps that would help the largest number of users or customers. Within these, prefer those which are easy to use and which help these users get a business benefit easily. If your analysis indicates that out of the potential apps that can be built, an office/agent location finding app would benefit most of your agents, customers and other business partners, build that first.  If you feel that there is a greater demand for an app to record FNOLs from accident sites then move it up your list of priorities.

Real time integration with back-end systems: If you were to develop an insurance renewal payment app, you would realize that users are more likely to use it if they get real time responses to their transactions. Immediate confirmations would certainly reduce their anxiety about the success of their transaction and increase the acceptability of your application. Real time integration may appear to be a daunting requirement for carriers with complex systems. But it can be achieved by use of web services to expose the required data/functionality real-time to your mobile application.

Mobile platforms:  Your app should function on the platform which is most likely to be available to your target audience. If your users have iPhones or iPads, you need to develop apps on the iOS platform. Do bear in mind that this is a single vendor platform. All applications developed for this platform must be cleared by Apple before being it is made available on the AppStore which is the sole distribution channel for iPhone touch applications. On the other hand if your users have a number of devices supplied by different vendors, consider developing the app on a multivendor platform like Symbian, Android, or Windows Mobile. The Android OS is an attractive choice because it is fast gaining popularity and because its development tools are free.

Though every carrier may have its own way of looking at things, the baseline strategy for all of them would of course always be to “do what the business demands”.  Do let us have your thoughts on the subject.

Read More about  Mobile Insurance Applications

Claims Reporting vs Claims analytic

Claims handling is one of the most visible and critical areas in the insurance business. Hence claims IT managers find themselves being showered with requests to provide various kinds of reports and analysis of claims data and trends within the data.

The interesting thing about these reports is that they never quite satisfy the end users and the analysts who review the data. So, we find end users downloading the output into excel sheets and then pivoting, filtering, analyzing the data from various perspectives like breakdown by demographic, post code, gender, and the myriad factors that contribute to the claims experience.

If you are faced with such a situation, you should really consider implementing claims analytics.The beauty of claim analytics lies in that it enables you to deliver multiple perspectivies of the same claim for various roles and levels of management with only a few dashboards. The dashboards provide slicing and dicing features that enable end-users to view the data from various angles without reverting back to the IT department for a fresh set of reports. The dashboards can be presented in a graphical format such as pie-charts where users can drill down on specific pies that interest them and continue a deep-dive to reach the individual values that produced the anomalous data.

In other words the payoff from investing in claims analytics come from reduced expenditure on report generation,and empowerment of analysts and quicker response to market trends.

Read More about  Claims Reporting vs Claims Analytic

Contract Management – the need

• Do you know how many contracts your organization has? Who is the owner of your Contract Lifecycle Process?
• Do you know how many of your contracts have Cost Penalties or Legal Liabilities? What is the cumulative value of your potential Liability?
• Are you sure if you are getting charged accurately for your software/ hardware contracts? Are your contracts re‐negotiated before automatic renewal dates?

• Do you know how much time it takes for updating your contracts in case there are new Regulations in place?
• Can you determine all your contracts with a specific entity, or in a specific Country? Or calculate your total contracted revenue expected for the month?
• Do you know how much time does it take to find a contract, send them between different locations? Do you know how easy it is to recover a contract in case it gets lost?
• In case of attrition can you guarantee no loss of correspondence relating to a contract? Would the audit trail remain intact?

If the above problems seem familiar, it’s time to investigate on whether your organization requires an enterprise wide contract management system.

Hexaware’s Concord – Contract Management technology platform will deliver capabilities to enable companies to work collaboratively and more effectively to manage contracts. This platform will provide enterprise wide contract management features that will help in meeting challenges that are critical to business such as efficiency, compliance and risk management.

The key benefits of having Concord are:

A Very Comprehensive Repository

• Manage Partner/Vendor Database
• Standardized Contracting Templates and Languages
• Enterprise wise Customized Contract Workflows
• Amendments to the agreement is managed

Easy & Convenient Reference & Retrieval of Information

• An inventory of Documents such as Legal clauses, Rate tables, etc.
• Simplified information retrieval during extended negotiations
• Minimize manual follow-ups between the provider relations, legal and financial departments
• Existing/old contracts can be imported and maintained in the system

Versioning & Redlining of Agreements

• Version tracking of agreements
• Facility to see the differences between versions
• Accept or Reject the changes in the versions can be done by Reviewer

Minimized Costs through Focus

• Contract generated in PDF format can be reviewed before printing
• Reduce cost accrued due to delayed renewal of vendor contracts
• Allow Relationship management staff to focus solely on Provider relations
• Ensured compliance through Templates, Section Library & Workflow tools

A High-End but User-Friendly Technical Support System

• Real time View into your contracts pipeline: Active, Terminated, Upcoming for Renewal and Expired Contracts
• Work with Excel etc. to edit contracts within the browser
• Use a simple and uniform paradigm to contract across all provider, broker and supplier types
• Integrates with your back office systems to feed contract, commissions, rate data to payer back office systems

Read More about Contract Management

Planning for success in insurance data migrations

Migration of insurance data often turns out to be a nightmare. Policyholder data in legacy systems do not fit the expectations of new systems: Mandatory factors required to calculate premiums in the new world are just not available for migration, underwriting rules in the new world do not accept legacy data, premium cash flows do not match. Addresses and customer data in particular do not pass validations of modern address validation tools.

If data is migrated incorrectly, the carrier will lose goodwill as angry policyholders complain. On the other hand, if the time taken to fix all issues related to migration is too high, the benefits of moving to the newer and presumably better system will be lost.

Given these conflicting constraints of time and quality, do we plan a successful insurance data migration project ?

Here are a few pointers:

a) Start with a gap analysis:

A business analyst should identify gaps from the frontend. While data analysts profile data and record data model gaps from backend. Covers that are no longer offered and retired products/policies in particular need to be reviewed critically to decide whether they justify migration.

b) Prioritize :

Use the profiling information gathered in study phase to determine how many policies are affected by each requirement. For example, if subrogration functionality been used only by 1 policy in 250,000, then it’s low priority

c) Iterate, iterate and re-iterate :

Data drives migration projects. Even if you have worked out a complete mapping, you have to take policies through their entire life cycle (endorsements, mid-term adjustments, addition of covers ,deductibles and so on) to be sure that they have been migrated correctly. Plan for at least 3 rehearsals before you go-live with full size loads to be certain that the migration works for all policies. Be sure to test the result with all interfaces (such as the ISO claims search, the direct debit bank interface – using stubs if necessary)  in the trial runs.

d) Dont try to solve all problems:

If you do that, you will never go live. Or it may take so much time to go live that the whole competitive advantage of moving to the new system will be lost.

e) Do not mix data cleaning and data migration:

Data cleaning is a separate project by itself. This is not to say simple technical activities like removal of junk characters cannot be included in data migration. It is activities like address cleaning and deduplication of contacts that should not be mixed with policy data migration.

f) Dont mix the migration project with other initiatives :

I add this because I have seen many migration projects derailed because of a sudden decision to upgrade the database or the programming language.

Do let us have your views,experiences and comments on the above suggestions. Also, be sure to check out the insurance data migration case studies on this site if you need more information.

You might want to read these awesome related posts  Insurance Data Migrations