Problem with batching – remove batching!

SulAmérica decided long ago to focus on the SME (small- and medium-sized enterprises) market as a business strategy in the healthcare insurance segment. This proved to be a good move, with the SME insurance quickly becoming a best seller within our healthcare portfolio. This is the retail side of health insurance, catering for small business owners and giving them access to our network of hospitals and services.

The process of issuing the policies, however, wasn’t quite as successful as the product itself. It took us days – typically around two weeks – to complete it. Worried about being able to control this process, we put in place a complicated system of checks consisting of inputting each proposal we received from the Sales Department into an ExCel sheet. This, coupled with a working system based on batching, meant that we received three large stacks of proposals per day from the Dispatching area.

Until the whole batch was processed and all the related information transferred onto the ExCel sheet, the next step in the value stream could not start their work – and that’s how delays occurred. Before a policy could be issued, we need to ensure all the documents are there, input the information in the system, check that the client’s signature is authentic, make sure the client has no pre-existing conditions, occasionally call for a medical analysis (upon submitting a proposal, a client needs to include Personal Health Declaration; in the presence of pre-existing conditions, SulAmérica needs to determine whether we can underwrite the risk), and finally perform a quality check.

The delays in the process also caused people from the Sales team to call us all the time to know when a proposal would be issued (only then do brokers get their commission, so you can imagine their hurry). Of course, clients can only begin to benefit from their health or dental policy after the policy number is issued.

I was the person responsible for all the handoffs between steps. Each of them was registered on the ExCel sheet – which meant that I saved and carried its backup around at all times, saved on a pen drive that I kept around my neck all day long. My colleagues joked that I went to sleep with it, for fear of losing it.

At first, the team struggles to see the batching problem. They knew there were issues with the process, but couldn’t see the biggest of them all. One day, during our first attempt at a hoshin exercise, our coach Flávio Battaglia from the Lean Institute Brasil applied a dynamic using a batch-and-flow signature process and we suddenly understood that it reflected our current process. It was clear that it made no sense to work in batches.

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