Processing of Requests for a change of insurance, UNION, a subsidiary of the largest Dutch insurance group Achmea

About

Founded in 1992, Union, is a leading insurance company in Slovakia. The company has more than 1 million customers and is active in all lines of insurance business, primarily in travel, motor and property insurance and also individual health insurance.

Within Union, Michal Pápeš is Manager of Enterprise Systems and Process Automation. Several years ago, Pápeš already noticed a need to digitize paper processes.

Michal Pápeš: “The first time we came in contact with Netgrif was in 2018. We wanted to digitize non-life and health insurance documents. These documents were all scanned manually. Our aim was to replace certain internal processes and systems, some of which were very clumsy, inflexible, difficult to use, not customizable and hard to maintain. Our aim was to transform this into a well-functioning digital process and we asked Netgrif to run a Proof of Concept.”

Netgrif was able to carry out this POC in an effective and efficient manner. 

Michal Pápeš: “Netgrif helped to develop the application for the various forms and shifted this – over time – to an e-flow system, our internal enterprise workflow, which is now the backbone of our organization.”

In 2018, when Netgrif and Union commenced their collaboration, Netgrif was still a start-up. 

Michal Pápeš: “So we took a significant risk by working with them! But we found their vision sufficiently interesting to embark on this journey together. Also, Netgrif was willing to provide us with the flexibility that we needed. Which was very different – in a positive way! – from what we had experienced with the very rigid vendors that we had worked with prior to that.”

The business benefits of the project became clear very quickly.

Michal Pápeš: “Thanks to the new solution, we have been able to reduce the manual workload and automate the health application form process. This leads to tremendous efficiency gains, especially during the peak period in October.”

Pápeš also appreciates the input Union receives from Netgrif on process and solution improvements.

Michal Pápeš: “Designing of business processes is very flexible and straightforward and Netgrif continues to come up with suggestions on how it can be improved even further. We are further shaping our products based on their recommendations. It’s really a joint development process. And slowly but surely, we have been able to centralize more and more business requests via the workflows that were defined in the Netgrif platform.”

From the beginning, Union has had a desire to run the project autonomously. 

Michal Pápeš: “Netgrif is helping us to build our internal skills and capabilities, so we can run Netgrif as a platform or tool internally, without the need to involve their developers.”

So, how does Pápeš see the future with Netgrif? 

Michal Pápeš: “I have no doubts that we will continue our collaboration. We will continue to work together on developing our solution further to encompass more and more processes and workflows, all to save valuable time and resources.”