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Shenandoah Life Insurance Company
Tracking workflow progress with IBM SPSS Reports for IBM i*

The situation

Mutual insurer Shenandoah Life Insurance Company provides a variety of insurance and financial products including life, dental, disability, and annuities. The company operates in 31 states in the USA and the District of Columbia.

The challenge

Shenandoah Life prides itself on delivering outstanding customer service, and is always searching for new ways to improve its performance. As a part of its continuous self-assessment process, the company identified its policy underwriting and issuing function as an area for potential enhancement. The policy approval process was paper-based and cumbersome. Paper copies of prospect applications were routed for approval to various departments within the company's home office, resulting in bottlenecks and delays.

The solution

Shenandoah Life implemented an imaging/workflow system to improve the policy approval process and eliminate the delays associated with paper-based routing. With the new system, new business personnel could perform a real-time check of the status of any policy in the approval process. To maximise the effectiveness of the workflow systems, the company turned to ShowCase® Suite from SPSS Inc., a set of business intelligence products, to provide administrative and executive reporting.

With the file that is created from the workflow system, we can use ShowCase Suite from SPSS Inc. to monitor specific tasks and determine if those tasks are being performed in a timely manner … [also] we can reduce the cost and time it takes to approve a policy, thereby improving the overall customer experience.

Kaffa Shank
Reporting Analyst
Shenandoah Life Insurance Company

The results

Mutual insurer Shenandoah Life Insurance Company is headquartered in Roanoke, Virginia. By the end of 2003, it had tallied record sales and a fourth consecutive year of exceptionally strong growth, which it attributes to a continuous focus on improving customer service. To generate further improvements, Shenandoah Life sought to reduce the time required to issue its policies, beginning with the application approval process.

The policy approval process was paper-based, which caused bottlenecks and delays. To solve this problem, the home office implemented an imaging/workflow system that would enable employees to scan each application and make the application information available company-wide. While this solution eliminated certain bottlenecks, others remained. Management turned to reporting analyst Kaffa Shank to provide analysis and reporting that would help minimise these delays.

As documents moved through the workflow queue, files were created to capture the timing of each step in the process. Shank used the ShowCase Suite from SPSS Inc. to examine these files and produce ‘time-service’ reports that revealed how long a policy took to move through the system.

Management gained access to current information on pending policies

The time-service report that shows pending business is particularly important to management. The data for this report is produced on a daily basis using IBM SPSS Reports for IBM i, IBM SPSS Warehouse Builder for IBM i*, and IBM® i scheduling software.

The final output is presented to management in Microsoft® Excel® using the IBM SPSS Reports for IBM i Add-In feature, which offers a current view of Shenandoah's new business and helps to identify where bottlenecks are occurring.

"With the file that is created from the workflow system, we can use ShowCase Suite from SPSS Inc. to monitor specific tasks and determine if those tasks are being performed in a timely manner," says Shank. "By tweaking these tasks, we can reduce the cost and time it takes to approve a policy, thereby improving the overall customer experience."

The time required to issue certain policies was reduced by 20 percent

Shank's time-service reports give Shenandoah Life's management the ability to monitor policies, locate bottlenecks, and devote additional resources to improve productivity. As a result, Shenandoah Life was able to reduce the approval time for policies with face values of less than $100,000 by 20 percent – from seven business days to less than six days.

The underwriting and employee performance review processes were Improved

Underwriters are now researching how the company can lower overall costs by reducing spending on medical vendors. They are using ShowCase Suite from SPSS Inc. to explore factors such as policy type and age bracket to determine if they can eliminate certain medical tests, which will further streamline issuing new policies.

The company is also able to supplement performance review and goal-setting information with data provided on the time service reports.

Shenandoah Life's investment in imaging/workflow and ShowCase Suite from SPSS Inc. demonstrates the premium the organisation places on technology to help improve customer service. With this kind of commitment, Shenandoah Life can undoubtedly look forward to another year of growth.

Interested in IBM SPSS Reports for IBM i*? Download the Shenandoah Life Insurance Company PDF here.

*IBM SPSS Reports for IBM i and IBM SPSS Warehouse Builder for IBM i, formerly called ShowCase Report Writer™ and ShowCase Warehouse Builder™, are part of SPSS Inc.’s Predictive Analytics Software portfolio.

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