Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Insurance Company Ensures Consistency in Quotations with New Collaboration Solution
Overview
Country:Indonesia
Industry:Financial services—Insurance
Customer Profile
PT Asuransi Allianz Utama Indonesia (Allianz Indonesia) is a member of the global Allianz Group. It provides life and non-life insurance to clients in Indonesia through 7 branches, 20 smaller service centers, and many agents nationwide.
Business Situation
In order to get the least expensive offer, clients asked for quotations from the agent, the branch, and the head office. Allianz Indonesia faced challenges managing which version of an insurance quote was offered to a client and ensuring consistency.
Solution
Allianz Indonesia used Microsoft® Office Groove® 2007 to support collaboration and to ensure that only one version of a quotation is used by the agent, the branch, and the head office.
Benefits
Synchronized workspace folder
Ability to collaborate offline
Ensured consistency
Faster search
Improved security features / “As Groove works by synchronizing the workspace, it helps us solve the versioning problem, expedites time-to-market, and enables us to collaborate even when some of us are offline.”
Erwin Purwadarma, Chief Information Officer, Information Technology, Allianz Indonesia
PT Asuransi Allianz Utama Indonesia (Allianz Indonesia) offers life and non-life insurance policies to customers across Indonesia. Issuing consistent price quotations was a challenge, as insurance agents had no effective way of ensuring that their quotations would match the ones offered by a branch or by the head office. Although agents used e-mail to exchange information, keeping track of the versions and identifying which version was most recent was almost impossible. Allianz Indonesia decided to become the first company in Indonesia to pilot Microsoft® Office Groove® 2007. Because Office Groove 2007 helps ensure effective collaboration, all representatives now work with the most up-to-date version of a quotation, and customers receive consistent information.
Situation
PT Asuransi Allianz Utama Indonesia (Allianz Indonesia) is a subsidiary of the global insurer and financial services provider Allianz Group. Established in Indonesia in 1981 as a joint venture among Allianz Asia Pacific & Africa GmbH and two local insurance companies, PT Asuransi Jasa Indonesia and PT Asuransi Wuwungan, PT Allianz Utama Indonesia has always remained on the leading edge of the information technology wave. Today, it has 282 employees, 7 branches, and 20 smaller service centers—also called points of sales—throughout Indonesia.
Upon requests from their clients, Allianz Indonesia’s agents regularly produce insurance quotes. Clients also sometimes request quotes from branches and even the head office. Often, the same client tries to obtain three different quotations from three different sources in order to find the best deal.
Many of Allianz Indonesia’s smaller service center locations are not connected online with the branches or the head office. Therefore, agents rely on fax and the telephone to get quotations reviewed or approved by supervisors. However, faxes are sometimes misplaced or lost, and when this happens, clients are given the wrong version of the quotation.
“We had situations in which quotations were flying around between the head office, the branches, and the agents, and no one knew which was the right version for the client,” explains Erwin Purwadarma, Chief Information Officer, Information Technology, PT Asuransi Allianz Utama Indonesia.
Allianz Indonesia needed to create a single version of the quotation that would be placed in the company’s portal and could then be used by agents, branch offices, and the head office, This way, no matter from where the client requests a quote, the company would be able to provide a client with exactly the same information on the policy and premiums..
Distribution of quotations to clients was another challenge. Agents often had multiple versions of the same quotation residing on their computers, which would invariably lead to confusion. Documents were distributed as e-mail attachments; however, e-mail was not a viable alternative. Keeping track of different versions was difficult and time-consuming. And, there was also always a chance, if one of the underwriters or agents was not copied on an e-mail, that vital information would be missed.
Purwadarma adds, “A quotation may also be revised a couple of times in a day. How can we control the versions that have been distributed among the agents but are no longer valid?”
In addition, collaborating on the quotation involved a lot of reconciling. Each of the agents and underwriters might have made revisions on the quotation that they had on their portable computers. When it was time to merge the revisions into a final version, they would have to find the relevant versions and compile all the revisions.
Being able to answer a client’s question with consistency when the agent or surveyor was not in the office was also a challenge. “Sometimes our surveyor was out of town when a client phoned in and asked to be updated on the latest status of his claim. Allianz requires a repository of information that other agents could use, so that any one of them would be able to provide the client with the information that they needed,” says Purwadarma.
“We have a sustainable IT environment. Now it’s time for us to leverage what we already have and turn it into our competitive assets, for example, by using it to improve productivity and efficiency as well as shorten processing time,” said Purwadarma. “E-mail is definitely not the right tool for collaboration, and therefore we need a more suitable alternative.”
Solution
Allianz Indonesia is among the few companies in Indonesia that has reached the stage where its primary IT concern is to utilize technology to improve its business processes. For this reason, Microsoft Indonesia offered the insurance company an opportunity to participate in a pilot program using Microsoft® Office Groove® 2007 for a period of three months.
When Purwadarma first saw the demonstration of Office Groove 2007 in November 2006, he immediately accepted the offer to participate in the pilot. “We recognized the power of this new collaborative tool and how it would solve many of our ongoing problems, especially the inconsistency of the quotations that we submit to our clients,” he said.
Office Groove 2007 enables any user to create a workspace and then invite others to join as they work on a project. The participants do not have to be online to take part in the collaboration. At Allianz Indonesia, the underwriters or anyone from the head office can invite agents to a workspace as they prepare a quotation to fulfill a client’s request. As soon as participants go online, quotations are synchronized with the file stored in the workspace folder of each participant’s computer. Previous versions are automatically replaced with the most recent.
Benefits
Office Groove 2007 enables Allianz Indonesia to ensure consistency in the quotations that it gives to its clients. In addition, it allows the company to come up with new products much faster. “All we have to do now is create a workspace and then invite the underwriters, the agents, and others to join and work together on a quotation that will meet a client’s request,” says Purwadarma .
Previously, Allianz had to rely on e-mail to inform the branches, smaller service centers, and individual agents that the latest version of a quotation was available. ”Today, we just have to drag and drop a file into the workspace, and the moment the participant gets online his own workspace will get updated,” Purwadarma says.
Because all the files are stored in the workspace folder of each participant’s computer, instead of in multiple e-mails, using search in Office Groove is much more efficient. “We all know how time consuming e-mail search can be,” Purwadarma says .
The possibility of collaborating even when offline solves another problem for PT Allianz Utama Indonesia. “Groove allows us to get rid of the fax. Quotations can be reviewed and revised as necessary, and when the agents connect to the branch or the head office, they will get the right version as their Groove workspaces are synchronized,” said Purwadarma .
With Office Groove, the most recent version is pushed to the computers. Since everybody always has the same version of the quotation, a client can no longer try to get a better deal by requesting different quotes. Allianz Indonesia will use Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 to make the most recent versions of documents available through a portal.
“As Groove works by synchronizing the workspace, it helps us solve the versioning problem, expedites time-to-market, and enables us to collaborate even when some of us are offline,” says Purwadarma.
Security is also improved in Office Groove due to the automatic use of 128-bit encryption. “In the past, we relied on the individual users to secure their files, but now it is done automatically for them,” said Purwadarma . Also, the owner of a workspace can manage that workspace completely. For example, if necessary, a workspace owner can terminate access for certain participants by deleting the workspace.
“I have often felt that each time I need a new functionality in the software that we use, it seems that Microsoft reads my mind and provides it in the next product upgrade. Groove is an example,” Purwadarma concludes.
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