Aon Is Driving Insurance Digital Transformation with Connected Insurance Technology
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
