Bajaj Allianz General Insurance Improves Efficiency and Accuracy with UiPath Enterprise RPA Platform Deployment

Bajaj Allianz General Insurance wanted to experiment with technology to reduce repetitive tasks and improve the accuracy and efficiency of business processes. By deploying the UiPath Enterprise RPA Platform, the company has leveraged automation for business excellence and achieved remarkable improvements in quality, scalability, and accuracy.

Bajaj Allianz General Insurance is one of the leading private general insurance companies in India. It has been ranked number seven globally in a survey of 100 general insurers on the digital front and figures in IDC's top 20 insurers across Asia-Pacific for 2020. This joint venture between Bajaj Finserv and Allianz is headquartered in Pune and operates from 180 offices.

Beginnings of the RPA journey at Bajaj Allianz General Insurance

Cutting down on redundant tasks and improving efficiency are objectives of organizations across the world. The insurance giant, too, was looking at experimenting with technology to scale up and providing quality and consistency. A few years back, Bajaj Allianz General Insurance felt that automation could play a key role in streamlining its processes and help in achieving higher customer satisfaction and accuracy at scale. Starting from procurement of proposals to approvals and issuance, it felt there were areas where robotic process automation (RPA) would help.

We were looking at various aspects of our policy issuance process. Once you deploy and train robots, you can easily scale up as volumes scales. Compared to a lot of other technologies, which have long gestation periods, RPA can be deployed fairly quickly. If all parties are on the same page and the process is simple and repetitive enough, it can be deployed quickly

Dipu KVPresident • Operations, Communities & CX at Bajaj Allianz General Insurance

Bajaj Allianz carried out a study of its various processes and reengineered them to make RPA amenable. The processes were redesigned and recalibrated. Some steps were removed to streamline the processes. Once the processes were RPA compatible, the tool came into play.

Processes targeted for RPA implementation

UiPath’s Enterprise RPA Platform has been largely implemented in processes of policy issuance. A total of 22 processes have been automated and 10 robots are in production. However, with increasingly better understanding of the technology, the company has progressively applied it to other areas.

Why Bajaj Allianz chose UiPath for automation

“We looked at the vendor’s capability, their ability to support us, reputation in the marketplace, etc. During the techno-commercial evaluation, we found UiPath’s product to be the best. They did a pilot and studied our processes. After that they were on-boarded,” says Dipu.

There was a rigorous vendor evaluation process. The company shortlisted potential partners for each PoC, followed by a techno-commercial evaluation process. According to Dipu, the implementation has been fast and the company has been able to achieve improvement in efficiency and accuracy. The RPA platform has reduced repetitive tasks and the company is saving a lot of time that was earlier spent in managing those tasks. Now that time is being used in more demanding and creative jobs.

Use case deep dive: Bajaj Allianz’s agribusiness

In the agricultural line of business at Bajaj Allianz General Insurance data was used to be downloaded from the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) portal for policy booking. There were several steps involved in the process. The report would get downloaded as an Excel report. Once the various reports were downloaded, they were merged. An employee had to fill in a lot of information in the right fields.

That is where the UiPath Enterprise RPA platform came into play. Now, a lot of this information gets entered without human intervention and the reports are generated automatically. Earlier, all these steps were carried out manually.

We were able to scale up the effectiveness of the process. Since the tool carried out the steps in a consistent manner, accuracy was supreme

Dipu KVPresident • Operations, Communities & CX at Bajaj Allianz General Insurance

Challenges in RPA implementation

According to Dipu, there were typically two kinds of challenges. The first was reengineering the process and training the RPA platform. The second was cultural reorientation.

“I think these were the two challenges which we've overcome successfully. Initially, there was a bit of rework. Once we understood, we were able to rapidly apply our learnings. It's working fine for us,” UiPath’s Enterprise RPA platform has been particularly helpful during the current pandemic crisis.

How RPA helped Bajaj Allianz maintain business continuity

Dipu says the technology has been particularly helpful in these trying times when movement is restricted.

“Especially in the COVID-19 scenario, when we are all working from home, the RPA platform has been very effective, for example, in terms of allocation of cases to users who are working from home. The role of the supervisor changed overnight, because employees are scattered. A robot can look at the data centrally and figure out the people working from home, current load status, and can dynamically allocate cases. That's when its value really comes to the fore. When everybody is together in an office, you may not realize it,” adds Dipu.

Promising road ahead for RPA at Bajaj Allianz General Insurance

On the future scope of RPA, Dipu says it depends on two aspects.

“Firstly, we need to look at the technical feasibility of deploying RPA, because we will have to figure out those processes. The other is going past this, we will have to look at cost-benefit analysis. If it makes technical and financial sense, certainly there is potential to take it to more areas. From our perspective, we will be happy to partner with them in more initiatives, which are win-win for both of us,” he adds.

Today Bajaj Allianz General Insurance is quite satisfied about the outcome of this technology implementation and admits that they have been able to achieve several objectives through automation. The company is confident about a potential future for RPA and by extension, UiPath.