Process Bionics: Process transformation in action

Getting to real-world results

A fundamental tenet of Process Bionics is delivering actionable insights that drive real, tangible results.

By leveraging advanced process capture techniques, your organization can translate your processes into data that is accurate and free from bias. This empowers your ability to draw insights and make informed decisions.

The power of Process Bionics doesn’t stop at the current-state insights drawn from process capture with process mining and process modeling. Often, process simulation is used to simulate how your future-state decisions will fare in a real-world setting.

The overall goal may be to eliminate inefficiencies and wasted resources in order to improve experiences for your customers and your employees, or increase your working capital. We find that our clients achieve these goals and see the following five tangible, real-world improvements across the board by leveraging process bionics:

• Fewer handoffs between users, groups, and departments
• Higher employee productivity
• Minimized non-value-added activities
• Greater process standardization
• Less rework and repetition

Stories from the front lines

To show how all this plays out, we’ll start by highlighting the insurance industry, mainly because it lends itself well to process transformation. Insurance processes traditionally rely on numerous handoffs and inefficient, error-prone manual tasks. At the same time, the industry’s customers—having grown accustomed to frictionless interactions with other technology-enabled industries—are demanding more digital ways of doing business.

Here are two vignettes.

Streamlining underwriting operations with process mining

This insurer was seeing customer service issues in their underwriting operations. Delays were up. So were complaints.

Process mining brought out several underlying causes—including inconsistent practices, manual tasks, and activities that added no value as far as the customer was concerned. As a result, underwriters were dealing with backlogs and no small amount of rework. In one scenario, for instance, the transaction was redirected to another queue, which added 15 more activities to the process and delayed completion by nearly six days.

With Process Bionics, the insurer was able to identify ways to reduce the average underwriting process time by nine minutes. Simulations based on 140,000 weekly transactions showed that improving processing time could increase throughput by 59% and allow the insurer to reassign 510 employees to other areas of the organization.

Speeding up submissions intake with process modeling

Another insurer realized their submission intake process was taking too long, negatively affecting the customer experience.

To find where the process was hitting speed bumps, the insurer modeled the existing process flows. That revealed areas where relatively simple changes could yield improvement. They then pulled out a clean sheet and worked with the insurer to design a new process that emphasized quality and speed.

Through a mix of process changes and AI-powered technology solutions, the insurer identified that it could reduce the cycle time by roughly 94%, allowing it to reach 21 times the throughput and reduce the number of needed employees for the intake process by 50%. From there, the insurer assembled a road map for implementation, starting with the quick wins and progressing toward automation.

Tangible improvements win the day

Until now, we’ve focused on the theory and mechanics of Process Bionics. At some point, however, the credibility of any management discipline rests on its ability to deliver tangible gains. The stories we just shared represent real-life applications of Process Bionics that drove transformation and led to strong value realization in the insurance industry. In our next blog, we’ll take the Process Bionics journey into the world of energy, resources, and industrials.

Get in touch

	Courtney Thayer Principal Center for Process Bionics			Alison Roy Managing Director Center for Process Bionics
	Daniel Csoka Specialist Leader Center for Process Bionics			Dinesh Kalluri Managing Director Center for Process Bionics
	Monica Monica Senior Manager Center for Process Bionics