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The headlines speak volumes. Regardless of vertical market, the interest in business process automation (BPA) solutions by enterprises of all sizes around the world has become intense.  This is particularly true in sectors where competition is intense and new entrants armed with next generation solutions are chomping at the bit to disrupt incumbents.

On such sector is the insurance industry which has historically been a technology adoption laggard. In fact, while all of the things going on with the disruptions caused by the advent of the “connected car” are grabbing the headlines, there is hardly an insurance line-of-business that is going untouched.  And, as numerous postings have pointed out, and industry observers have recommended, the insurance sector needs to literally and figuratively get with the BPA program from back office to customer facing activities or suffer the consequences.

It is for this very reason that insurance industry software solutions provider Sapiens International Corporation announcement of the general availability of Sapiens IDIT Software Suite 12.1 to its customers and business partners worldwide is of note.

Sapiens, which is expanding its focus to the broader financial services industy, offers end-to-end solutions to the global general insurance, property and casualty, life, pension and annuities, reinsurance and retirement markets, as well as business decision management software. The 30 year-old company has more than 130 financial services customers and its team of approximately 1,000 professionals operates through fully-owned subsidiaries in North America, the United Kingdom, EMEA and Asia Pacific.

BPA enhancements for insurers

As the company says, the Sapiens IDIT Core 12.1 is “designed to increase the productivity of general/property and casualty (P&C) ergonomic user interface and intuitive user experience that will help insurers achieve greater efficiency across their organizations.”

The Sapiens IDIT Core 12.1, which is available for immediate delivery, has some interesting new functionality and enhancements. These include:

• A Manager Dashboard, to significantly improve visibility by providing organizational unit managers with a clear, one-time glance of employees' workload, tasks, task statuses and severity levels
• Enhanced Setup Wizards, including enhancements to the Claim Setup Manager, which simplify the process of creating reserve and payment templates
• An improved Product Manager, which features more intuitive lines of business and product parameter setup. Cover plans can be created with ease and products requiring deposits can be set-up
• The ability to easily import and export products, setting the foundations for standard out-of-the-box products
• Business process upgrades, including a refined claim payment handling process and deposit collection and handling
• Sapiens Docs, an add-on component to Microsoft (News - Alert) Word (2010 and 2013), enables insurers to create document templates in Word, using content control tags

The company is also citing technical improvements which include: an enterprise JBOSS rollout, side-by-side with latest versions of hardware, software and databases; multi-thread performance enhancements; and Rule Analyzer, a tracking system designed to help the product configuration manager isolate and identify rule setup issues, saving time and effort.

"We are confident that our continuous investment in the Sapiens IDIT Software Suite demonstrates our undisputed commitment to innovation. This commitment, along with our unparalleled insurance domain expertise, increases the business value we deliver to our customers and partners," said Gary Sherne, president of Sapiens' P&C/General Insurance and Reinsurance division.

The upgrades are going to be welcomed by Sapiens’ customers as they represent business process automation (BPA) capabilities that will make workflows easier and faster.  Given the increasingly fickle nature of customers in all of the hotly contested insurance businesses, BPA solutions are going to get serious evaluations in 2015.