In today’s fast paced, competitive world, it is very important that insurance companies balance as much risk as possible. Failure to seriously look at this issue, in terms of their systems, can have catastrophic effects on the business.
In other words, the need for the most effective form of insurance IT system is more crucial than ever, as insurance companies have to deal with regulations, data security and fraudulent claims on a constant basis.
Visibility of transactions
The risks involved in the insurance business can be dampened and reduced by having business transaction management (BTM) software monitoring your IT application infrastructure. This improves the application performance and availability of the tools when they are needed. This is exactly what a business transaction monitoring tool will do.
The transactions themselves are at the heart of the process, and the middleware interconnected applications that process those transactions are responsible for completing the work required within the system. The transactions must respond to client or business requests and need to be visible to the IT team. If they are not visible to the IT team then problems will start to occur.
Reducing risks and bottlenecks
Risk is increased in the insurance industry when business transactions are not visible. The longer transactions are out of sight, the more risk there is to the business as a whole. Should data be lost or misplaced for some time, the insurance company could be looking at serious fines (if they breach any performance regulations or privacy laws).
This is a very common occurrence in current IT systems when transactions fail to complete, abort, slow down or hit a bottleneck. This is serious in itself, but the failure to monitor the performance availability, capacity, reliability and impact of the transactions, means that there are far too many unknown factors.
The IT team will be unable to effectively handle such an issue without business transaction monitoring. A great solution to this problem is Nastel Technologies’ Business Transaction Management (BTM) solution, AutoPilot.
AutoPilot is now used by a number of customers in the insurance industry for the purpose of monitoring their claims processing applications. AutoPilot is especially applicable to these insurance industry clients, through the special design of its built-in Complex Event Processing (CEP) engine (which is core to its ability to predict and even prevent problems). The resulting BTM technology allows Insurance IT administrators and IT teams to have complete visibility into every insurance transaction, as well as into the functionality of every critical system in real time.
Many insurance firms are considering the user’s experience as a key component of their strategy to retain customers, another risk that needs to be considered. This technology can also help monitor end user experience and alert when user experience is about to be impacted.
AutoPilot’s Efficiency Reduces Risk
AutoPilot lets the company balance the risk factor by giving them visibility into claims processing, real-time quotations and illustrations, underwriting and rating, self-service portals, Medicare administration, unit dealing, agency interfaces plus many more.
If there are batch jobs that don’t complete in the system then the efficiency of the entire business is going to suffer. This is just one example of how a BTM solution such as AutoPilot will increase the efficiency of an insurance company.
As the efficiency of the system increases, the risk factor is reduced. The likelihood of regulation fines reduces rapidly. AutoPilot also alerts IT staff of hiccups before they blow up, which means costs are contained and the delay or possible loss of information is avoided.
This is a perfect solution for the IT team as they can monitor the system in real time and do not need to concern themselves with unseen bottlenecks occurring in the system. AutoPilot has predictive determination and prevention built in via its complex event processing (CEP) engine so IT and any other stakeholders will be alerted should any problems occur.
Business transaction management is essential to balancing insurance risks. By providing visibility into every transaction, BTM prevents lost data, breaches in meeting regulations, bottlenecks that cause slow transaction processing, etc.—all factors that have an impact on the bottom line. AutoPilot is one way to assure that stealth waste isn’t eating away at an insurance company’s foundation.
