Dear All,
After many discussions with customers, prospects, consulting partners, and colleagues, I'm convinced that SAP owns a treasure for insurance companies that needs to be raised: SAP Policy Management (FS-PM).
SAP Policy Management provides a key-feature that could change the insurance business globally. It can speed up daily business, and reduce costs - while increasing insurance customers' and intermediaries' satisfaction ... the next generation is aready available.
What I am talking about?
All business processes and transactions, which are provided in FS-PM standard (and they are impressive), have been 'background-enabled'. An insurance customer (e.g. policyholder, insured) or an intermediary can change an existing insurance online, anytime and autonomously. This powerful FS-PM capability goes far beyond new business, which has already been automated for years.
Behind these technical terms is a great potential for changing the game in the insuance industry, providing the highest level of self-service: various changes of existing policies can be processed via any user interface, from any device, even from a smartphone or tablet.
It doesn't matter, if mid-term adjustments, or out of sequence changes need to be made, or whether they are backdated or should be valid in future.
Think about intermediaries like insurance brokers, agents, and banks. And consider also policyholders and insured. For example: if they want to change the payment frequency of their existing policy from monthly to semi-annually, they can just do it for example via a web page immediately.
Utilizing FS-PM there is no need for manual intervention from a clerk or policy handler, who is usually keying in the same data in the policy system again, which has been requested via letter, e-mail, fax, phone call, or entered in a 'front-office' software application that is - very often - not tightly integrated (e.g. agent system, portal, and so on).
FS-PM provides a lot of APIs for simple as well as for complex policy changes that can be wrapped into RFC function modules, and exposed as web services or OData services. Of course, they include all validations, values, and dropdown lists. Thus, the business logic does not have to be rebuild on the front-end side once again.
Either existing front-office software can 'consume' such Web Services, or appropriate dialogues will be build on the customer side, and made accessible via a customer-tailored web page or a broker portal for instance. Particularly, responsive HTML5 web pages can be used for building intuitive dialogues, dedicated to specific roles (e.g. call center agents, sales representatives, brokers, agents, policyholders, or insured), quickly and with limited effort.
If an insurance company can provide customers or intermediaries with a step-by-step guidance to process changes of existing policies, this insurer will be a business process leader in the market - not only a thought leader.
Let's raise the FS-PM treasure.
Best regards,
Jochem
