Jeff Rauscher is director of solutions design for RedwoodSoftware.

The primary focus of an insurance company is the customer, butwith so many customers generating so much data, it can be achallenge to accurately collect, update, and analyze customerinformation across locations and platforms. For efficient claimsprocessing, you need to eliminate bottlenecks and human errorwherever possible. Automation gives you the speed,consistency, quality and efficiency you need to provide the bestpossible customer service as your organization grows. But to reallybe beneficial, you need to implement it across the entireenterprise.

Many Offices, One Company

As insurance brokerages become more successful, more satelliteoffices also spring up. With more offices, more employeesnaturally follow. The good news is that your company servesmore customers. Unfortunately, that's also the bad news. Withmore customers you now process more claims with more employees andmore offices.

This situation wouldn't be much of a concern if each individualoffice operated completely autonomously and serviced only customerswithin that geographical region, but in reality that's not whathappens at all. Instead, your billing department is in onelocation, claims processing is in another, and technical support issomewhere else entirely. Different time zones, geographicboundaries and poor communication can mean that your criticalprocesses take more time, involve more people and generate moreerrors. Ultimately, it's the customer who suffers, but youdo, too.

Localized automation doesn't offer much of an advantage to acomplex company. In fact, if records and processes aren't wellconnected between locations, there's really no difference betweenelectronic processing and the old-fashioned paper records we'dnever dream of using anymore. To be truly beneficial to thecustomer and the company, systems should also be automated andconnected like any other business-critical information.

Instead of looking at each individual office or department as anindividual entity, you need to connect and orchestrate yourprocesses together—in every location. Automation is the key. Withone unified automation solution deployed across the entireenterprise, installed on-premises or provided through the cloud,you can link these locations and automate many of the complexprocesses that stretch between them. With automationimplemented across your entire company, you can speed processes,enforce standards, and support the visibility you need, whereverand whenever you need it.

Good for Customers, Great for Business

Automating and connecting locations and processes supports botheffective customer service and staff efficiency. Once files andprotocols are appropriately connected across your enterprise, staffin all departments, at all locations, can access consistent andcomplete data no matter where they are. There's no more waiting forsomeone in another office to complete a task, make sense of aunique spreadsheet or retrieve data. Instead, the conclusionof one process will trigger a command that immediately andautomatically, begins the next. From the customer'sperspective, it is flawless and fast. For your company'spurposes, it is efficient, accurate and reliable.

Let me give you an example. A large insurance provider with morethan 600 branch offices and a server estate of more than 1,000Microsoft Windows and Red Hat systems needed to share critical databetween offices, partners, customers and providers. This was nosimple requirement. Layers of localized procedures madecoordination between everyone difficult—and mostly manual. Thistook time and cost them in human error and slow customerservice.

To solve this problem, the company implemented anenterprise-wide automation solution that gives them a singleplatform to control a wide range of applications and tasks. Now allof their management information gathering and distributionprocesses are linked together and automated in logical, dependentsteps that are fast, accurate and easy to manage. The automationplatform also helped them standardize procedures so that all of theoffices support consistent company policies. Today, they don'twaste time on manual tasks, and everyone's happier as a result.

Ultimately, enterprise-wide solutions like this provideinsurance brokerages the opportunity to improve all of theirservices. They reduce the time required to check and re-checkrecords for accuracy as well as the time required to wait forinformation from another department. That makes a stronger company.Automation also erases time required to process claims or establishcoverage. That makes happy customers. Enterprise-wideautomation can mean a big win for everyone involved. Take a look atyour organization today and see how it might help you. You'llprobably be surprised at how much good you can do.