SilverBridge, a financial services application solutions provider, has introduced an integrated workflow component to its world-class life assurance administration platform. Exergy NodeWalker is creating hype in the industry, helping insurance companies achieve better results in these tough economic conditions.
In a highly competitive industry where efficiency is key, workflow can have a huge administrative benefit for claims departments. NodeWalker enhances processing times and ensures work is always correctly allocated and prioritised.
SilverBridge CIO and product development Executive JC Oberholzer says Exergy NodeWalker is an ideal solution for call centres. “It is a human workflow component that provides the ability to assign and manage workflow items between different work lists.”
“It encompasses work distribution, reporting as well as workflow on claims processes. It is a work queue management module in Exergy that manages items in an activity queue for an individual user or in work pools between numbers of users with similar functions,” he explains.
NodeWalker uses a ‘publish-subscribe’ mechanism to generate and move workflow items between work lists. It enhances efficiencies as users are automatically informed of work that has been passed through one process, ready to be sent through the next process. This also means that work is automated through the workflow when business rules are met, requiring no human interaction. This reflects just how deeply integrated this module is with the Exergy rules engine.
A significant event in the lifecycle of a policy can be subscribed to by one or more workflow routes, which will trigger the creation and movement of workflow items in the route. In addition to these predefined set of events, custom events can also be created by using the extensibility model of Exergy.
NodeWalker provides the ability to subscribe to events in order to create workflow items and to assign these items to specific user groups. More importantly, it monitors the SLA on items in specific nodes of the workflow and acts on items falling outside of the SLA.
Oberholzer says work pool administrators also have the ability to view and reassign items in a user’s work list. “Administrators can view and manage work list of employees where employees are on sick leave. Furthermore, administrators can set up SLAs and escalation procedures on a fine grained level. The ability to do performance management with this tool is extremely exciting.”
NodeWalker provides a user with access to an up-to-date work list, they can work on appropriate items and at the same time, have a view of the scope of work to be done. A user can navigate to the contract, claim or client entity from the work list.
Users now have the ability to park items for future action and pended items can automatically go to active status. They can also easily navigate to the associated items in order to complete tasks and if required, they can pend work items which fall outside the normal operating parameters.
Being tightly integrated into Exergy means lower cost of ownership and seamless integration provides users with easy-to-use interfaces.
“NodeWalker is tightly integrated into Exergy. Compared to commercially available workflow systems, no integration into Exergy is required, it is optimised to work with Exergy and we will maintain this with Exergy into the future,” he concludes.
