Executive Summary
Rapid market swings, changing customer and channel requirements, pressures from shareholders and regulators, and continued hyper-competition are forcing insurers to re-examine not only what products they sell, but also their processes and tools for developing, deploying, monitoring, and managing products and product portfolios. This examination confirms that existing manual and automated systems are inadequate to provide the support required by the demands of the age.
Leading insurers are finding many reasons to agree with the noted MIT researcher, Charles Fine, who wrote that �the capability of ongoing concurrent design of products, processes, and the intra- and inter-organizational network of competencies required to deliver value to the marketplace is perhaps THE meta-core (or innercore) competency above all others.� A new approach – Enterprise Product Management (EPM) – provides the required framework for today�s environment. EPM is a disciplined approach for effectively and efficiently managing all aspects of development, deployment, and maintenance for individual products and for portfolios of products. EPM targets the alignment of product strategy with corporate goals and objectives, and provides management tools to effect accountability for results. Given the complexity of today�s insurance distribution and underwriting environments, insurers� existing technologies do not have requisite flexibility and robustness to fully enable EPM.
However, EPM focused technologies are available which leverage existing enterprise and departmental systems, minimizing the cost and disruption of system replacement. This white paper describes the rationale for EPM, defines its components, outlines the business
benefits for EPM and describes the current state of the art technologies supporting implementation of EPM. It ends with a recommendation for an enterprise-wide, singular and consolidated enterprise view that will enable insurance firms to effectively manage their products. In today�s customer-driven environment, dominated by rapidly evolving actuarial and underwriting necessities, new channel requirements, conflicting pulls between product commodization and customization, and increasing scrutiny of profitability by shareholders and regulators alike, successful insurers will be those that adopt new approaches and systems to support an enterprise view of product management.
Table of Contents:
- Enterprise Product Management (EPM) for Competitive Advantage
- Technology Challenges of Enterprise Product Management
- Business Benefits of EPM
- Introducing Insurance Innovator™
- Conclusion
Read the white paper, pdf, 17 pages, 230k
