Enhancing Workflow Automation in Insurance Underwriting Processes with Web Services and Alerts

Underwriting is one of the important processes in insurance operations. The applicant´s information, including various kinds of medical information, must be evaluated before the insurance company can decide to accept the application. These activities are usually supported by process automation facility. However, the support of exception handling mechanism and the monitoring of turnaround time in those process automation solutions are usually inadequate. This results in a low efficiency of the underwriting operations or even loss of business opportunities. To address the problem, this paper presents an alert-enhanced underwriting system (AUS), which handles the exception events and monitors the turnaround time with the concept of alerts. We further illustrate how Web services facilitate workflow integration and process communications