All of us have to deal with an insurance company for one reason or another.  Pretty much every person in the USA is insured.  Each insurance agent has thousands of insured customers and each insurance company has thousands of insurance agents.  That amounts to a lot of people and a lot of policies to keep track of and provide outstanding service to. 

Why outstanding service?  With so many insurance companies, if your company does not give outstanding service, it is very easy for your customer to go somewhere else.  With our distressed economy, customer loss is not an optimum result and increasing your competitive service-oriented environment is imperative.

One of our customers was faced with such challenges in addition to lowering costs and regulatory pressures.  Trying to keep up with the pressures of being an insurance company can be complex enough without having a “Sandy” come through your door.  With claims alone, the process is:

• First Notice of Loss
• Assignment
• Coverage
• Contact
• Investigation and Evaluation
• Negotiation and Settlement
• Litigation management
• Recovery and Salvage

Each of these milestones need to be monitored individually so that both IT and the business liaison have their appropriate status.  Not to mention being able to meet SLAs!  Obviously, insurance companies have more to handle that meets the eye.  And there is the problem, too much to monitor and not enough eyes.

With this level of complexity, a software solution that provides real-time analysis, detects impending problems and provides early-warning alerts is essential. You need to get to the the root cause of problems before the damage is done.  While insurance groups do utilize monitoring tools to monitor application performance, it sometimes requires as many as four consoles to get the job done.  And most often it is only understandable by an IT subject matter expert.  One of the lessons learned from the Gulf oil disaster is that monitoring has to be predictive, simple to use and understand and be accessible to both  the expert and the non expert. There just isn’t time and resources to decipher what the monitoring tool is trying to say before you can take action.

When people are struck with disaster, they don’t care about the process.  What they care about is that they need their money quickly and without hassle.  Over time, the applications, the middleware interconnecting them and the transactions they invoke in order to deliver these services will invariably develop performance issues, incur failures and exhibit logic errors.  This can lead to performance issues that slow the claim adjustment process.  Neither insurers nor insured can afford these problems.

To learn more about an application performance monitoring solution that ensures the availability and performance of your claims processing via auto discovery, real-time monitoring and analytics via complex event processing, take a look at this case study.