UiPath Helps a Global Insurance Provider Save￡140,000 in Six Short Months

A leading global insurance provider needed a better way to eliminate bottlenecks, increase capacity, and improve employee productivity. By partnering with UiPath, this company successfully automated many repetitive manual tasks, initially saving the equivalent of 18,000 labor-hours and delivering cost savings of ￡140,000, all within six months’ time.

A global financial services and insurance company has one clear purpose: to help provide financial security for its clients and their families. A UiPath insurance client strives to help its customers live their lives with confidence, give them peace of mind, and enable them to realize their dreams for their loved ones and their overall legacy.

To achieve these goals, this company wanted its workforce as closely aligned with its customers’ needs as possible, a goal that was sometimes hindered by certain internal processes and workflows. “After reviewing the way some of our departments worked, we realized we could do more to free employees so they could spend more time on higher value work,” said the company’s chief solutions architect. “Our goal was to increase capacity in our claims, sales, and service departments as well as other customer-facing parts of our business.

RPA to the rescue

This resolution led this insurance provider to evaluate robotic process automation (RPA) technology. RPA was appealing because of its proven ability to automate highly repetitive, time-consuming, rules-driven tasks. Like any other company, the insurance organization had its fair share of these workflows and was quickly convinced that automating them with RPA would free valuable time and enable employees to continue to provide exceptional client service.

The company partnered with Deloitte to first find the right RPA vendor and then help in their efforts to design, develop, and deploy an initial proof of concept (PoC) pilot program. The insurer looked at three of the industry’s leading RPA vendors—UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere—and ultimately selected UiPath. “The overall breadth of the UiPath Platform stood out from the other vendors’ products,” recalled the solutions architect. “We were also impressed with the high quality of UiPath support and account management teams.”

Taking UiPath to the cloud in Microsoft Azure

The company had one final requirement: that the prospective RPA vendor’s technology was capable of being hosted in a public cloud environment using Microsoft Azure. The first reason was that the insurance company primarily used Microsoft products, but beyond that, the IT team had specific requirements related to scalability, cost management, and development processes that were compliant with its own “Azure DevOps” methodologies. This was especially important since the company simply didn’t know what to expect from the UiPath rollout in the early phases of the project.

UiPath demonstrated that the UiPath Platform and the UiPath Orchestrator infrastructure already had a proven path for hosting in an Azure environment. “We quickly saw that we could deploy UiPath technology in our public cloud environment and quickly scale up with future UiPath Robots as needed,” said the company’s solution architect. “UiPath delivered ‘out-of-the-box’ capabilities related to DevOps, security, and scalability.”

A successful PoC—on many different levels

Once this decision was made, Deloitte helped the insurance company pick the right process to automate as part of its PoC. “We started by looking at many different tasks within 10 different processes,” said the company’s solutions architect. “Any one of them would have been a good fit, but we identified a workflow in our motor trade policy renewals process that would be a good test for UiPath automation.”

Everyone loves these UiPath Robots and are pleased that their hard work is freeing human employees to tackle more interesting analytical work. These -obots have been warmly received by their colleagues, and we are already looking at new tasks that they might be able to take on.

Solutions Architect • Global Insurance Provider

In this case, the previous task required employees to locate customer data in a legacy mainframe, extract it, and enter this information in a number of highly complicated macro-enabled spreadsheets. The process was extremely time-consuming, error-prone, and repetitive—in fact, a closer look revealed that these steps had to be performed hundreds of times per week. In short, this workflow was the ideal candidate for RPA.

As part of the pilot program, a single UiPath Robot was able to automate the task a milestone achievement for the PoC on two different levels:

“Our first goal was to understand how RPA technology worked and if it could be used with our legacy systems,” said the solutions architect. “Yet this pilot also became a use case that showed how we could deploy RPA to help other departments achieve similar benefits.”

The overall breadth of the UiPath Platform stood out from the other vendors’ products. We were also impressed with the high quality of support and account management teams from UiPath.

 Solutions Architect • Global Insurance Provider

A UiPath Robot delivers 5x time savings

Bolstered by the initial success of its PoC, this insurance company rolled out its first official UiPath Robot. In this case, the UiPth Robot would automate the process related to extracting information from customer correspondence and matching it with an appropriate claims form.

The solutions architect explained the department’s previous approach to this task. “When a customer writes a letter or sends us an email, that correspondence has to be scanned and entered into the queue,” he said. “From there, a human employee would have to read it and take certain actions, such as copying and pasting details from the scanning system into a claims order. Yet when you think about it, there is a clear business logic for how to best complete this task, which made it a natural fit for RPA.”

UiPath RPA been the biggest technology I’ve seen in my career in terms of having such a positive impact on the business. I’ve never seen anything like it. It has been fantastic to use UiPath RPA technology.

Solutions Architect • Global Insurance Provider

Today, this UiPath Robot has been able to automate this important task and deliver impressive time savings. In the past, human employees required approximately four minutes to read a particular customer correspondence and match it to the right claims file. Now, the UiPath Robot can do it in less than 42 seconds.

The employee experience

This global insurance provider wanted to be careful to communicate with employees and dispel any potential concerns that the UiPath Robots would take their jobs. “We did all we could to proactively communicate the benefits of this program and make sure our employees knew that this technology was intended to replace repetitive administrative tasks,” said the company’s head of solutions architecture. “We were fortunate. Word spread about early RPA successes, and soon other departments started asking for their own UiPath Robot to automate processes.”

He also points out that it helped to let employees know that RPA would help them focus on work that would be more interesting and rewarding. “Some of the first automations we developed were those tasks that were the most tedious, time-consuming, and repetitive. So, we were able to flip the RPA project from something that may have concerned employees to the case where RPA has now helped increase job satisfaction. Our employees are not spending as much time on menial, repetitive tasks and can now focus on much more rewarding work.”  

RPA has now helped increase job satisfaction. Our employees are not spending as much time on menial, repetitive tasks and can now focus on much more rewarding work.

  Head, Solutions Architecture • Global Insurance Provider

Additional robots continue the tradition of excellence

This global insurance company continued to roll out new UiPath Robots and encouraged employees to name them. This led to the development of two additional robots focused on automating routine claims and administrative work. “Everyone loves these UiPath Robots and are pleased that their hard work is freeing human employees to tackle more interesting analytical work,” said the solutions architect. “These obots have been warmly received by their colleagues, and we are already looking at new tasks that they might be able to take on.”

At this point, the company has deployed 13 UiPath Robots but has its sights set on rolling out 50-100 more within the next 12-month timeframe. For example, the company has already developed a fourth, a new robot that will help the commercial motor team.

All of this has added up where it matters most: a stronger bottom line. The company estimates that the current robot deployments saved 18,000 labor-hours and achieved a cost savings of￡140,000, a number that delivered an unprecedented project ROI.

When asked to summarize his experience with UiPath RPA, the solutions engineer is excited about what the company has been able to achieve. “It’s been the biggest technology I’ve seen in my career in terms of having such a positive impact on the business. I’ve never seen anything like it. It has been fantastic to use UiPath RPA technology.”