Global insurer Allianz Group serves 126 million customers in 70 countries. The company began their intelligent automation journey in 2017. They evaluated an SS&C Blue Prism digital workforce via a proof of concept. Once successful, the team quickly and broadly scaled the program, adding eight trained staff and establishing a robust framework and governance. They now have 60 digital workers automating over 100 processes and around 2.5 million transactions each year.

Starting with a strong foundation 

As part of the initial project, Allianz identified six processes to build within the first six months, aiming to maximize the impact across the organization. The automation team is based in operations, so they have visibility into the wider business. This has allowed them to identify opportunities in underwriting, pricing, finance, IT and compliance. The team sees the longer-term benefits to employees and customers alike. “We could see, as a result of our investment in automation, that we were freeing up our teams to add greater value to the customer. Because manual activities were being automated, it allowed our people to do more. It has also enabled Allianz to accelerate its digital and data strategies,” said Chris Hartley, Allianz’s Business Simplification Practice Lead. Additionally, the automation team was proactive in communicating the benefits of the technology and helping employees understand how it can help their day-to-day roles.

A scalable solution 

Once digital workers had demonstrated their value in high-volume, straightforward processes, the team looked to evolve. They were innovative in how they chose their new automation projects, asking themselves “Can we automate processes that need some reengineering or reengineer the process to automate more of it?” They looked to enhance their digital workforce with technologies like optical character recognition (OCR) and natural language understanding (NLU) which enables them to apply some structure and meaning to unstructured data. Areas that initially benefitted the most were claims and operations, but they’re now identifying opportunities and automating processes across the business. The most important success factors in scaling their automation program have been starting small to understand the possibilities, investing in people, creating a robust governance model from the start and having a well-structured change management process.