An Innovative Approach to Insurance Product Design
Flexible Industrial Concepts in Insurance
Researchers:
R. Leuzinger (external), Prof. P. Schönsleben
Partners:
A worldwide leading Swiss insurance company
Financed by:
The project partner
In industrial production, rationalization and standardisation have long been essential. It has been a constant challenge to simultaneously retain flexibility in order to accommodate customers' wishes. This problem influenced the design of products and workflows. The relevant concepts and methods have been generalized for all industries and applied throuhgout the production of materials commodities. Recently, the insurance industry has been faced with the same challenge. The most evident solution has been to attempt to transfer appropriate design concepts for products and workflows form industrial production to insureance. Insurance products are now treated as configurations, like industrial products. There are so many ways in which insurance products can be assembled from components that ultimately we found ourselves transferring concepts for multivariant product configurations form industrial manufacturing into insurance. This proved to be an extremely difficult task due to the nature of insurance products, and we had to expand traditional industrial concepts considerably in order to do so.
This project is now realized by the company. The first families of products have been designed with this tool. Contracts are now sold using this designs. These first experiences show how the concept can be improved (response time, user interface).
In spring 1996 we published a book containing the general concepts (''Flexible Versicherungsprodukte: Anwendung industrieller Konzepte in der Assekuranz'', Gabler-Verlag, Wiesbaden). As a consequence, several other insurance companies have now their own project with a similar goal.
During 1997 and 1998, the various difficult tasks during the realization have been formalized. The result extends today the original concept and has been included in the dissertation work of Mrs. Leuzinger.