Nedbank Case Study

Nedbank Groups’ history traces back to the early 19th century with the establishment of the Cape of Good Hope Bank in 1831 to the formation of the...

Nedbank Insurance

Success Story

About Nedbank Insurance

Nedbank Groups’ history traces back to the early 19th century with the establishment of the Cape of Good Hope Bank in 1831 to the formation of the Nedbank Group as we know it today.

Headquartered in Sandton, the bank has strategic alliances across the globe, and are proud of their reputation as one of the most transformed banks in South Africa employing near 30,000 staff.

Nedbank Insurance (NI) offers a comprehensive range of product solutions both on and off license, covering four broad product categories, namely Credit Life, Simple Risk, Investments and Non-Life. This ensures that clients, ranging from individuals and their families to large corporations, can enjoy tailored solutions that provide them with everyday certainty.

The strength of the Nedbank strategy is to create a great client experience and grow market share in key value-creating areas enabled by Technology, People and Brand delivered through process/operational excellence

The Business Challenge

Today our Nedbank Insurance Operations environment services clients across both Life and Non-Life solutions via Contact Centre, Policy Administration, Underwriting and Claims teams. They are supported by a Quality Assurance team as well as a Procurement and Internal Loss Adjustor team. We also have a team of Broker Support Agents who support our Distribution Risk Advisors. Nedbank Insurance Operations set up a Contingency team nearly five years ago and this team supports the whole business during times of production volatility.

With teams dispersed nationally over South Africa, the Operations management team had previously relied on spreadsheets to track the volume of work in progress, resources, and available capacity. The time lag between the collation of data, its consolidation and presentation led to reactive management decisions based almost entirely on historic operations performance.

The Selection of ActiveOps and Workware

Real-time Operations Insights and Management

As the Card Division of Nedbank was already a Workware+ method customer the selection of ActiveOps was based on demonstrable operations efficiencies.

Following the Workware+ deployment phase, Nedbank Insurance established a single real-time view of all operations performance, work volumes, and capacity leading to a 15% increase in productivity in year one and a further 15% in year two.

Implementation

The implementation took place after a health check review. The first step included simulation training for Team Leaders and Managers. Awareness was rolled out to all Operations team members who had to manually capture productivity tasks into AOM. After two years NI introduced “Connect” which enabled AOM Workware to be integrated with the business’ Policy Admin system. In hindsight, NI should have considered this step earlier.

Benefits of Time

"ActiveOps has helped Nedbank Insurance to merge three businesses that were previously managed separately; namely Life, Short-term, and Brokerage. Today, the management team has the same business planning capability and there is a science behind management decisions" - Angela Vernes, Head: Operations at Nedbank

Benefits

Client service levels and turnaround times were improved including:

Funeral claims reduced from 48 to 24 hours;
Death claims reduced from 10 to 7 days;
Retrenchment claims reduced from 10 to 7 days; and
Policy Servicing reduced from 4 days to same-day turnaround.

Benefits to people and processes

AOM Academy and other training have been incorporated into the Operations curriculum to ensure a standard that is achieved across all leaders.

Team leaders are now able to manage proactively through daily buzz meetings with decisions based on trusted performance data. Best practice and top performers are easily identified enabling the recognition, coaching, training, and improved engagement of all team members.

Active decisions are now made at planning and variance meetings to plan resources, training, and the movement of team members between teams in anticipation of forecasted work volumes and available capacity.

Manual processes are now accurately monitored for continuous improvement and suitability for automation.

The operations management team is now better equipped to compile and submit compelling business cases for operations changes and approval of headcount.

Using the ActiveOps maturity model as a guide the management team is able to quantify and identify the level of maturity within key aspects of their operations which can then be focussed on and improved.

‘Working from Home’ after implementing the business continuity plan during the Covid-19 lockdown was enabled through AOM planning and measurement. It was easy for management to identify where volumes had dropped, and which areas needed more support.

The Summary

Way forward for NI:

During 2020 NI have created an AOM Centre of Excellence and has an AOM Lead who now supports the whole business on a permanent basis.

AOM methodology is being rolled out in our Client Experience Complaints Team.

Data is being reviewed to be incorporated into a PowerBI data warehouse to enable the availability of more integrated reporting.

AOM “Connect” is being reviewed to ensure the availability of more real-time data for quicker decision making and proactive management responses to unexpected changes to the daily plan.

At ActiveOps we’ve conquered operations management. Our platform simplifies complexity and can boost productivity by 15-25% and higher, unleashing your operation’s potential. Our technologies expose a 360 view of your digital and human operations — including remote workers. Make clear, data-informed decisions. Attack your most complex issues at scale. Amplify and accelerate your operations management and make the move towards operational excellence