Aon Is Driving Insurance Digital Transformation with Connected Insurance Technology

Aon Is Driving Insurance Digital Transformation with Connected Insurance Technology

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well good afternoon everyone i'm jake sloan  vice president of insurance and healthcare   for appian i'm joined today by uh aeon's global  delivery leader mark walzma hello we're gonna   talk today with you about uh aeon's case study  for modernizing legacy systems with uh appian   local strategy so mark thank you for joining  appreciate it and uh we'll kick off here with   just a little bit of background on how you know  through the pandemic we've seen a number of large   insurers that are really accelerating you know  their digital strategies and we've talked about   you know how uh this is the new norm we're not  going back and that the digitization aspect is   just critical and so mark today we appreciate your  time here to walk us through and just a little bit   about you know your story as well as you know  kind of what you've done with the aeon team and   to kick us off you know kind of what led aeon to  look at low code what opportunities and challenges   existed and they don't want to hear from me  they want to hear from you so yeah sure so i   sit on the reinsurance side of aeon and we had a  few drivers at play there one was we had a goal   to increase revenue by 100 million dollars  over a three year period at the same time we   wanted to restructure our business operating  model on the back end consolidate offices   leverage an offshore vendor partner and there was  a few challenges that came with that uh one was   you know we had a massive custom-built  broking platform it actually started off   as a y2k mainframe replacement it is it's in a  constant state of enhancement it's not actually   20 years old but it's large and complex  a big monolithic database on the back end   it was originally designed with really an expert  type user in mind people you know very highly   flexible highly configurable software applications  but required strong reinsurance domain knowledge   to use it properly and you just don't kind of find  that off the street and and the other thing was it   was a high reliance on emails um uh report driven  notifications and if you walked around people's   desks in the office you'd see like post-it notes  and to-do lists off to the side and we really   wanted to flip the script on that and say can  we make the next gen system call users to action   put it right in front of them here's what you  need to go do rather than the other way around   that's fantastic and that way you know you think  about all the succession aspects of that you think   about the speed it's critical to be able to meet  the changing market demands and of course the ever   present you know cost takeouts and that balance no  that's that's fantastic right so can you confirm   or deny that there's no more green screens at all  no we didn't have that before but yeah glasgow   the programmer's retired yeah so how did you gain  buy-in from you know the perspective so obviously   you had a business case lined up with your teams  you had you know kind of that mutual alignment but   when you think about you know key considerations  uh during your vendor selection process as you   evaluated can you help the teams here understand  that yeah so you know we have like i said a large   complex system we had a 24x6 requirement you  know customers in 160 countries around the world   we needed something that like an industrial  strength integration to go with it we needed   something that was that was you know big enough  to match what our requirements were uh so   customer service and support was important to us  logging monitoring security ease of upgrade paths   was important a strong plug-in market and a very  active user community that's fantastic i remember   a story as you were evaluating through there about  a competitor's upgrade path that was year versus   how fast appian's was and you know we think about  all those changes that you're making the system   and everything that you know the daily  changes of business uh just how key that is   it yeah i mean it's uh it's been really  slick so if you're if you're new to appian   you know i get a notification saying hey we're  gonna here's your plan maintenance on this date um   sometimes we tweak it by a day or two just to work  around releases or company holidays and stuff but   for the most part it runs we log in after  like hey everything worked nothing broke   and off we go like i don't think we've had  a single outage or a single thing break   from an upgrade yet long gone are the days of uh  all that anxiety yeah yeah no that's fantastic   and i should know to the audience too so we're  going to make time at the end here for questions   so as you have questions uh please save those up  and we'll leave time here at the end with mark   so when you look through the business benefits  that you're able to achieve to your application   what major results or business benefit was kind of  top of this for you yeah so we want to start with   optimizing the back office part first so so  it's really about speed of claim collection   premium payment and all the case management  like managing the electronic messaging and   the settlements that goes with that streamlining  that as much as possible while transitioning to   an offshore resource that's largely done at this  point and what that's enabling us to do is then   roll out appian across the front in sales broking  cross places broking places so we get new business   coming in now we've already optimized the  back end to be able to handle that with the   same care that we do today that's fantastic  so your scale your ability to get to scale   now that you've optimized the back end the sales  teams can go wild sometimes we see those get out   of sync creating a bottleneck and a burden but but  you're using a a multi-shore strategy if you will   both a blend of on and off and that's  correct that's fantastic no that's great   so then when we look at uh you know lessons  learned as far as you know top lessons key   takeaways if you were to advise the audience today  you know what would you uh yeah give them candidly   yeah there's a few so one was we were caught off  guard by the speed at which we could deliver with   appian and we didn't have enough uh api developers  to go along with it so you know like i said like   our uses of appian is really layering case  management on top of an enterprise system   and we want to do that through apis at the same  time we were taking a chance of breaking apart our   monolithic database building new microservices  where it made sense to integrate with appian   and and the the ui layer and the business process  model layer got developed so fast we actually   didn't have enough api developers to keep up with  it so that was one thing if we go back in time   i'd have probably a larger api team uh to keep up  with it some of our other processes weren't quite   tuned so we've got like a data change request  process you think of in the traditional sense   i want to add a column to a table um that could  not keep up with the speed of things that were   innovated within appian so that had to change  a little bit the other thing i would go back   and do is have a very strong devops presence  ease early in the in your appian journey um   at least someone who's like a champion for the  platform and takes ownership of its administration   and its deployments ideally someone in your  devops department but could be anyone i guess   nice nice so you go back to the api  aspect of it is it just you know you   you under anticipated that the speed at which  we can move is it a combination of competing   priorities or uh yeah it's a little bit of  both it was interesting so we we had actually   built out a ton of user stories and acceptance  criteria for what we envisioned uh appian to do   and uh appian professional services came in and  actually threw that all away started from scratch   and what we ended up with was far better than what  we had imagined like like we had not come from   that that bpm platform mindset we'd come from like  a traditional software development mindset and we   were kind of still early in our agile department  too or agile delivery as well so app professional   services came in really took a look at it from  a like a fresh perspective of case management   and we end up with something a lot better in the  end that's great yeah i remember the early days   the full agile aspect of it when we talked about  being 10 to 20 times faster than the traditional   methods and and it's great and shameless  plug avnet methurin you'll be talking about   the aeon growth story from a customer success  perspective tomorrow that is correct perfect so as it relates to really any future plans  or you know kind of how do you intend to build   you know on your project success moving forward  as it relates to you know going forward overall   yeah so like i said the focus has shifted  more to the sales front-end placing process   now um so we're when we're done with that we're  expecting to save 83 000 human hours a year   um when that's rolled out and when you've got  case management across your back office and you've   got an efficient placing process on your front  office all through appian the uh i'll make a plug   here the connected possibilities of just proper  handoff between front office and back office gets   maximized that's kind of our vision so that's  there's there's some other odds and end stuff   where um you know anytime like some approval  processes or anything that's been driven by   emails today or someone having to run a report  or receive an email those are reviewing those   as really good candidates to move into appian as  well and you just feed that into your existing   change governance process that you've adapted yes  yeah and i understand that the success overall   globally has started to spread the good news about  how you've done and the rest of the organization's   starting to take notice and expanding it as  well that's correct that's great that's great   so with that we've left plenty of time here for  questions we heard there were several groups that   may want to talk maybe wanted to speak afterwards  and we had this time now to to answer questions   so i think we've got a microphone at the back yep  there we go so what questions from the group here thank you quiet team or the second  to the last one yes in the front so the question was was it the portfolio or was it  just a single system that that your team decided   to modernize it it was a portfolio i i can best  describe it as an ecosystem of applications so   at a deployable component level is about  100 applications and and and middle tier   components across this that handle uh everything  throughout the entire reinsurance broking process   everything from like pipeline management policy  management crm document document tracking   invoicing settlements and all the electronic  messaging and reporting and bi in between   so we really started with the back end kind  of policy management execution aspects is   what we try to modernize first so that's  really the premium and the claim handling   and now we're moving into the front office  application so probably think of in terms of it's   it's like 45 end user facing applications built  on top of another 50 like middle tier components   run on a common otp database a common set  of frameworks um common set of apis um but   really that presentation layer was really was  was aging and needed to be replaced so we had   we had a lot of uh winform-based applications  that are now being displaced by appian but   we've been able to preserve the kind of the  api layer and some of the existing databases if we were starting this today that's probably  what we would have done um back then we actually   we threw it up on a white board and and we uh we  did a cost benefit analysis of all the use cases   and just said all right where it's what's causing  the most pain today and where's the greatest gain   that we can get from a case management system  and then uh and then we pick things in between   and saying well let's try to get some early  successes here and and start easy and then once   we've got success there we moved on to the more  complex use cases thank you question behind um the question was how you prioritize you've  been very successful you get that yeah   and the question was how you prioritize  new and future projects yes so we've   started down the path of like a distributed  appian approach so the way the way we're   internally structured with our teams is we've got  we've got like a client services team we've got a   finance team and we've got two sales teams one one  of our treaty types and facultative product types   and our goal is to build an appian  skill set in each one of those teams   so we've got a product owner that oversees that  functional area so they manage the priorities   they manage the backlogs they're the liaison  to the business stakeholders um and then we've   we've tried to grow our talent in-house um we  do we are a little bit vendor reliant right now   um for for day-to-day and project-based work um  but it hasn't been a problem it's worked out well   um but we let we let each kind of solution  area prioritize their own backlogs and then   should they need capacity over and above what  we have they make a business request and we go   staff log that team or leverage app and  professional services to run something in parallel   did that answer the question  perfect yes in the middle yeah so i'd say that was something that we  did really well to begin with so that hasn't   changed a whole lot if anything appian plugged  into our existing change management process   um i know it's it's nothing all that sophisticated  at the end of the day we've we've got the uh   we've got a project intake mechanism things go  through a qualify phase if it's if it fits in   a sprint it just goes on our product backlog  and we have a product dedicated product team   that picks that up if it's more than a sprint  or requires cross-team or additional investment   we go through a project charter process which  defines goals outcomes scope duration cost   and then we've got a quick approval  process for that and off we go   it's really where if we're talking like half  a million dollar investment or more there's   there's more uh uh rigmarole to get that  approved but um but you evaluated for all the   the pipeline that comes through and yeah and all  the benefits through your standard existing you   know your processes prior to that it's just a much  faster uh path for you right it's kind of been   for each product that we've built it's kind of  like a big upfront investment to get initially   created and then largely the ongoing work after  that just flows through our normal product backlog all right over here yeah i think that's another thing we've always  done really well even prior to to appian coming   on so i think there's just a firm belief and  i'm speaking from it here that we're at our best   we're at our very best when we're aligned  directly to what the business wants   so we've got we've got product owners with you  know 20 years of reinsurance or aeon experience   um that's there's a dev lead that oversees that  solution area whether it's client services finance   sales that usually has an equal amount of  experience and uh it's it's been a good   partnership um because it goes both ways right  they they recognize that we have to do some things   that they don't necessarily care about but we've  got to keep up with you know technology we've   got to eliminate technical debt constantly  and it's just it's been a good partnership   i think it comes down to you got to earn it first  but if you deliver on time with high quality   you gain their trust and then they'll come  back and um they'll give you some leeway   for for it initiatives when you need it yeah  and i imagine the low code flexibility adds   to it as far as change orders along the way or  you know changes to the applications yeah that's   being able to iterate on a daily basis and show  them immediate feedback have them tweak it change   it versus the original waterfall absolutely  that's great thanks all right anyone else no all right oh and in the front here yes go ahead yeah it's a good question so i'll give you my  perspective on it and i disclaimer i don't know   if it's the best or the right way but but here's  how we looked at it um so process data process   metadata we kept in appian um our single source of  truth remained our existing oltp databases or if   we spun up a new like microservices based database  so things like policy management claims premium   entity information that that was exposed to appian  through apis um if it was certain things that   needed to be looked up or searched on frequently  we would basically cache inside appian for just   quicker response times but it was really the  division of labor says you know transactional data   that's like quarter our core to our business  you know we kept in our existing systems exposed   through apis processed data case management data  metadata around that we kept we stored in appian hill and i think the modeling exercise is the  same for both that was maybe a little bit mistake   we made at the beginning where we were kind of  thinking you know all right you know appian low   code rapid development let's just throw a database  out there it's like it's like i probably come from   a little more old school saying no actually you  want to have that same rigor and design of your   database that you do on the transactional side in  the appian side as well it's the day it's a it's a   relational database um i treat them equally but  once you're created then you can from there you   can go fast for certainly yeah the governance  yeah it's key all right any other questions yes yes yeah so there wasn't a lot of overlap  because really what we built new and appian to   start with was the case management layer which was  non-existent in our current systems we we did have   a little bit of it uh in an application um and so  so to manage that roll out we did it on a region   or a country by country basis where we would go  into a country and kind of time and say you're   going to stop using you're going to stop using  this system and you're going to convert over here   there was an element of some historical data  backlogging but it wasn't it wasn't much we didn't   that wasn't really a problem we had it's probably  a luxury that not everyone in this room has but   because we didn't have that case management  to start with it was it was largely new um you know the only thing and i think this is  coming with the portals which we're not there   yet but uh you know kind of the t-shirt sizing  you know appian today at least you know it's a   little bit monolithic in that you purchase like  t-shirt sizes of of of the size of environments   you want and having more elasticity there or a  little bit more flexibility like i want to scale   up on app servers but necessarily web servers and  not have to go up a whole t-shirt size would be a   nice feature yeah with portals your career that  is coming then that elasticity especially you   know the seasonality that comes with either  claims or shopping yep or a hurricane or   hurricane exactly yeah yeah seasonality all right  we have time for one more question does anybody come back otherwise mark will be i think  you're gonna hang out for us a few minutes   so i have a few minutes and i've got a um i  got another rehearsal next door so well mark   thank you for your time thank you for being a  customer yeah appreciate it thanks all right

2022-09-04 08:31

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