Insurance Policy Management with SAP
Today’s insurance market has clear requirements for the policy management systems of the future. Insurance companies must be able to react quickly to changing customer requirements and to provide appropriate products and solutions. To do this, modern policy management systems must be highly flexible, user-friendly, and easy to maintain. Only then can an insurer produce flexible, tailored, and modular products across all lines of business (LOB). At the moment, changes to products are still made manually in policy management systems.
However, in order to remain adaptive and proactive in the core business areas of an insurance company, modern software technology must automatically transfer and adjust the definitions of new products and changes to existing products in the structures for policy management. SAP Policy Management (SAP FS-PM), SAP’s insurance policy management solution, can make necessary changes automatically.
Fully integrated with the SAP for Insurance set of solutions or as a stand-alone application, SAP Policy Management provides core policy product and process templates for standard and highly complex insurance products and services related to life and property and casualty insurance( insurance on physical property and legal liability).
SAP Policy Management: The Hub of SAP for Insurance
SAP Policy Management is the core of SAP for Insurance solution portfolio. SAP Policy Management provides a flexible and open architecture that manages all policy information and readily integrates with other SAP for Insurance applications – including SAP Claims Management, SAP Insurance Collections and Disbursements, SAP Incentive and Commission Management for Insurance, and SAP Reinsurance Management – as well as non-SAP applications. We can implement each application on its own or deploy SAP Policy Management as the hub for processing all transactions.
The application contains templates for standardized products, services, endorsements, and riders to meet the changing and evolving needs of international insurance markets. Key features are mentioned below.
Business Process Management
Business process management is a way of optimizing and automating common tasks within an organization performed by people and systems. BPM in SAP Policy Management is based on proven SAP technology. The configurable business rules engine and process design framework provide a powerful yet flexible tool to execute standard and complex, manual, and automated insurance transactions.
Product Management
The market for insurance products is constantly changing. Regulatory requirements, consumer behavior, and competition within the industry require increasingly innovative products and flexible systems.
With SAP Policy Management, we can begin with ready-to-use product templates and use them as-is, or we can easily adjust them to suit specific requirements. With the runtime environment, newly designed products are available quickly. We can actively manage policies at the policy level. If we make a change on the policy level based on knowledge about a product, for example, the application automatically makes available the specific rules governing that product.
Policy & Transaction Management
With SAP Policy Management, we can search, change, or create policies. We can record changes to contracts, schedule changes that involve effective dates in the future, and manually trigger business processes. The software maintains a complete history of the changes. Using workflow, we establish rules and amount thresholds for secondary approvals, automating the change management process for increased efficiency and faster time to market.
The ability to track and audit processes and changes within our policy management software is as important as having effective processes. SAP Policy Management helps we document all executed processes for policies and related business transactions. We can research and track all transactions – manual or automated – and view relevant correspondence, as well as complete and incomplete transactions.
We can use SAP Policy Management to create versions of policies based on time periods. This enables us to compare and model policy versions from multiple perspectives and later audit or report on the comparisons and variations.
History & Journal Management
After we create a new policy, SAP Policy Management ensures sequential processing of its related contracts. Additional processing for the policy or associated contracts can include inquiries from customers about the status of previous contracts, predated changes like an additional deposit in the next month, automating the out-of-sequence endorsement booking process, or updating contracts and executing scheduled changes. SAP Policy Management completes and documents all changes to business objects (like a policyholder’s age or the policy limit), ensuring we meet auditing requirements. To support future audits, the application records the person making changes, the changes, and times of the changes in a control log. We can also reactivate contracts that are no longer valid or back out of contract changes while documenting the process.
Correspondence
The core software also supports a full range of correspondence output processing. We can generate the correspondence in real-time or schedule it as a batch output. We can work with the SAP Interactive Forms software by Adobe, and we can integrate correspondence with third-party document management systems.
SAP Policy Management is divided into a basic part and into lines of business parts with industry-specific product models and business processes/transactions.
Further, it easily integrates with other SAP for Insurance components such as SAP Business Partner, SAP Collections and Disbursements, SAP Claims Management, SAP Incentive, and Commissions Management, SAP Reinsurance, and is also tightly integrated with SAP Netweaver components such as SAP Business Workflow, SAP Authorization Management, and SAP Correspondence along with integration into SAP Business Intelligence components.
Business Benefits
The robust functionality of SAP Policy Management can provide substantial business benefits:
- With the application, we can increase revenue by giving employees, agents, and other partners access to uniform, accurate policy, and customer data across an integrated, insurance-specific landscape.
- Maximize up-selling and cross-selling opportunities using accurate policy and customer data.
- Use analytics to determine customer value and our company’s profitability across lines of business and business units, as well as to segment and analyze customers to model growth, profitability, and risk management opportunities across our books, or subsets of business.
- Reduce costs by using automated, Web-based processes to manage our policies and products more efficiently.
- Gain more accurate and timely insights into our products, identify and respond more quickly to new opportunities or challenges, and customize our offerings with robust, financial analysis tools.
- Integrate third-party business portfolios using the application’s support for multiple currencies and languages.
- Boost customer and employee satisfaction with a full range of innovative and competitively priced insurance products and services
Powered by SAP NetWeaver
SAP Policy Management is powered by the SAP NetWeaver platform. SAP NetWeaver unifies technology components into a single platform, allowing organizations to reduce IT complexity and obtain more business value from their IT investments. It provides the best way to integrate all systems running SAP or non-SAP software.
SAP NetWeaver also helps organizations align IT with their business. With SAP NetWeaver, organizations can compose and enhance business applications rapidly using enterprise services. As the foundation for enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA), SAP NetWeaver allows organizations to evolve their current IT landscapes into a strategic environment that drives business change.
