Over the last three years, ADIS saw a sharp increase in umbrella policy activity. "With such volume increase, it's no surprise that manual processing of contracts was reaching its limits," says Hugues Thiry, manager in charge of development tools. "The problems were that, on one hand, we had a real lack of traceability of contract actions, especially when contract processing had the potential to differ from one agent to another. On the other hand, it was difficult to measure the overall policy portfolio, which made piloting our umbrella processes challenging."

The company began looking for a start-to-finish process for contract management. "Our ambition was to clearly envision a process that would facilitate daily exchanges with our business partners and AXA agents and supply more visibility to managers," says Mr. Thiry.

"Those two objectives quickly put us on to TIBCO ActiveMatrix® BPM for business process management and TIBCO Spotfire® for sharing visual analytics. TIBCO worked in sprints with releases every three weeks. They trained us, and the results were good group dynamics, fast interactions, and no tunnel effect."

The first processes were launched for umbrella contracts after only six months. The TIBCO solution insures linkage between back-office systems running on AS/400, and front-end tools intended for the agents. "We implemented processes on the existing system with enough automation to start. We monitored to avoid errors we had seen before, then analyzed processes and developed more automation.

"On a daily basis, the practice is similar to case management. We not only formalized and automated processes, but retained the possibility of disconnecting from the process if needed. If an agent feels blocked, they can make a request outside of the process. In that case, we are not dealing with a document, but with a set of data the coherence of which we have to assure throughout the process.

Support for Growth

"With our new TIBCO system, we are able to support growth. Without deploying BPM, it would have been very complicated." AGIPI, the association of insured persons managed by ADIS, saw its strongest period of growth in 2016, to 65,000 memberships. Of 300 ADIS partners, 200 use the BPM solution on a daily basis. Every week, 850 new umbrella policy applications are handled by the BPM solution, which is the only system used for umbrella policies. Extending a new savings line of business should double these activities.

New Visibility

Without any training, management easily adopted Spotfire. Three types of data visualizations are produced: a view of the current number of projects being handled; a top-down view of business, refreshed daily; and processing time by action and type of process. "Our users were very satisfied by Spotfire because it avoids Excel extractions and gives them the ability to use numerous filters.

"Besides using Spotfire in the context of BPM and analyzing insurance contracts, we will use it from now on to analyse the performance of our flow of documents received and forwarded to the electronic document management system."