(RPA) applies specific technologies to automate routine, standardized tasks in support of an enterprise’s knowledge workers. By freeing human employees from these mundane tasks to apply themselves to core business objectives, RPA offers a number of compelling benefits to the workplace.
 – Institute for Robotic Process Automation (IRPA)

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) seems to be now crossing over the hype cycle and delivering real-world benefits in driving efficiencies, leaner processes and reducing costs and errors in processing of massive amount of demand or data driven processing systems that traditionally had a lot of human effort invested in mundane tasks.

Let us take a look at some real-life business solution areas in Insurance that RPA has been able to address successfully over the last year.

Insurance has some very key areas that are time consuming, data intensive as well as customer contact center based. Lot of human effort is spent on data gathering, collating data from multiple system, updating systems with changes or new data and validating and processing.

Based on data and case studies shared by various RPA Tool implementations, here are the areas in insurance where RPA has demonstrated successful implementations:

  • Claims Registrations: RPA has improved time for claim registration process by at least 50%.The contact center has saved at least half the time it took for each claim registration to be registered and updated.
  • Credit Note Refunds: RPA implementation improved the overall time and cost for Credit Note Refund process. On an average for the same number of transactions, it reduced the processing time to 1/5th and the same throughput achieved through 1/4th of the processing staff.
  • Approval for Credit Note Refunds: With the implementation of RPA, the Credit note Approval process delivered 50% more efficiency with 75% less manpower.
  • Cancellation of Policies: RPA implementation improved the cancellation process massively. For the same amount of transactions, the current process delivers in 1/3rd of the time with 1/9th of the earlier processing staff.
  • Registration of Forms: RPA implementations improved forms registration process by 40% with half the number of staff.
  • NCD (No Claims Discount) Verification: Pre- RPA, the NCD validation manually took about 10 mins. Post RPA, after the agent uploads the details, the BOTs can verify and flag mismatches within 2 minutes for the same number of applicants.
  • Policy Issuance: Policy Issuance is a time consuming exercise and can take more than a week for the process to be completed manually. RPA implementation has reduced the effort at all stages and in the post RPA world, policies are issued in less than 2 days.
The above benefits highlight the success of RPA.

The RPA Bots have been able to:

  1. Download Data
  2. Scan and Read Data
  3. Upload / Enter Data in key systems
  4. Verify Insurance period / NCD and flag mismatches
  5. Provide approvals
  6. Create follow-up emails / alerts
  7. Collate Data from various systems by logging in and provide a 360 view to contact center staff.

Though there are still limitations on how RPA can be effective, (mostly hardware/mechanical and OCR related), there are many new research and tools that are scaling up to overcome these limitations.

Given the real-world benefits, beyond the hype delivered by RPA, it is bound to spread into other business areas. With incremental improvements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cognitive systems, RPA implementations can only improve to deliver more benefits. The limiting factor is most likely to be how organizations and society are geared up for these changes and respond to them.