Exigen Group Unveils Insurance Process Backbone

Exigen Group announced at the 2003 Annual ACORD Conference Monday in Orlando, the Exigen Insurance Process Backbone, which extends its current insurance product offerings.

The only ACORD standard-based product on the market that enables enterprise-wide business processes to be supported as a fusion of a customer’s existing processes, systems, business units and distribution channels, the Exigen Insurance Process Backbone is designed to provide insurance operations with a foundation for straight-through processing (STP). Currently available for pilot implementations, the new software release addresses over 150 cost leaks which can account for as much as 80 percent of activity-based costs in insurance business processes.

Exigen Insurance Process Backbone enables companies to measure and reduce the impact of cost leaks that arise within end-to-end business processes. A deployed STP solution assists in identifying, reducing and continuously monitoring these cost leaks in order to achieve and maintain straight-through processing, even when steps of a process are performed by a third-party administrator or outsourcer.

“In an industry where efficiency and accuracy are critical in maintaining and improving profitability, insurance companies have to improve both business capacity and revenue by leveraging automation,” said Jim Logan, general manager of Insurance Solutions at Exigen. “Exigen Insurance Process Backbone allows for standardization and automation of business functions that enable straight-through processing for rapid ROI, and more importantly, sustainable, continuous cost reduction.”

Controlling Operational Costs
Present Exigen STP solutions have been successful in identifying and reducing customer cost leaks, and the Exigen Insurance Process Backbone will make achieving results like these easier, faster and more predictable than ever:

* A back-office insurance processing department of 30 reduced to six employees while simultaneously increasing claims handling capacity by 250 percent.
* Policy origination turnaround at one surplus insurance company was reduced 50 percent in the first year and another 32 percent in the second year.

Methodology and Technology Improve Processes and Optimize Costs
Exigen’s Joint Value Assessment methodology complements Exigen Insurance Process Backbone to ensure successful implementations. Blending technology with methodology allows a joint Exigen and customer team to prioritize process improvements based upon reducing costs, increasing customer satisfaction and targeting quick operational value creation. The methodology helps a customer identify their as-is operations, activity-based costs, and target to-be processes that are then configured with Exigen Insurance Process Backbone by using existing templates and configurations. This implementation methodology allows Exigen (www.exigengroup.com/insurance) to deploy most projects in 90-120 day iterations.

Exigen Insurance Process Backbone provides productivity improvements for employees through workspaces that guide them through a task based upon their skill level, role, and overall process within which they are executing. By using intelligent checklists, smart forms and universal desktop technology, work time is minimized with fewer opportunities for errors.

Accuracy and compliance for processes are enforced with pre-built decision engines to automate a variety of business policies such as claims profiling, assignment of cases and restrictions on policy availability based upon a customer’s segment or credit history. Business policies and regulations are input by business users through externalized decision editors rather than requiring IT programming in order to adapt to changing business environments.

Template processes and business maps are included with Exigen Insurance Process Backbone to implement policy origination, administration, billing inquiries and claims processing while sitting on top of a variety of packaged or custom core system environments.